My boss at CNN Interactive — Harry Motro — asked me an innocuous question in my interview that I later decided was quite meaningful.
In one sentence: what drives you? What gets you out of bed in the morning?
I said: I like to make cool things.
He hired me. I’ve been thinking about that answer for thirty years.
What I meant at the time was mostly technology. This was 1995. The web was new enough that building anything on it felt inherently cool — you were doing something that had never existed before, for an audience that was discovering a new medium in real time. We launched CNN.com. We produced the first commercial internet video webcast. We built things on infrastructure that barely existed using tools we half-invented as we went. The technology was the cool thing.
That’s changed. The technology stopped being the cool thing sometime around when it became invisible — when the internet stopped being a destination and became the medium everything runs on, when apps stopped being remarkable and became expected. I don’t get up in the morning excited about the stack anymore. I get up in the morning excited about the problem.
More specifically: the people solving the problem.
What I’ve come to understand about myself as a product leader — and it took longer to understand than it should have — is that the thing that actually jazzes me is the team in the room when a hard problem gets solved. The PM who finds the insight hiding in the user research. The designer who reframes the problem so completely that the original solution becomes obviously wrong. The engineer who says “actually, if we do it this way instead” and changes everything. The moment when a group of smart people working on something genuinely difficult suddenly sees it.
That’s the cool thing. The artifact — the product, the feature, the platform — is evidence that it happened. But the moment itself is what I’m after.
I also still make things. Literally, on weekends. There are a few of them on the projects page of this site. A macOS utility that solves a notification problem that was annoying me. A local news aggregator for Atlanta because the good journalism is there if you know where to look. A personal interruption manager that treats your attention as the finite resource it is. None of these are going to change the world. But the process of finding the problem, thinking through the solution, and building the thing — that still feels like what it felt like in 1995. I still like to make cool things. I’ve just gotten more particular about what cool means.
This site is somewhere to put all of it. The professional work, the side projects, the things I’m thinking about, and — at some point — the stories from the years when the internet was being invented and I happened to be in some of the rooms where it happened.
Welcome. Pull up a chair.