About Me

Early days

I grew up in poverty and intermittent homelessness. I have heard that some prefer the term ‘unhoused’. I was not unhoused. I always had some kind of housing — a car, hotel room, or rental — but I never had a home.

We always needed and were lucky to have help. We got help from community organizations, churches and the government. The mix of things we got always changed. Sometimes we got plastic cheese, other times we got embarrassing, oversized, candy colored monopoly money for buying food. These are kid memories, so forgive my approximations.

I have, on several occasions, felt deep gratitude that I grew up in a country where my government made sure that I didn’t starve as a kid. And in fact, I ate pretty well if you include the free school lunches. I later learned that when kids get good nutrition, they do better in school and contribute more to society when they grow up.

So, here I am, many years into working for Google across one of our big product areas thinking, “In one aspect, I am one of those kids who got government benefits and am now contributing to society, at least in an economic sense. But I have more to contribute.” I have to help others in a direct way.

“How did you get out?”

Starting around middle school we moved to an Appalachian valley at the end of a red clay road — with no indoor plumbing, no video games and no VCR.

My favorite toys were a box of pencils and a screwdriver. Doorknobs stood no chance next to my curiosity and screwdriver. I took apart any small gadget, studied the inner workings then perfectly rebuilt it (right, mom?). Scrap wood, cloth and building supplies were as good as any Lego set; better even, because with only raw materials I had to invent what I would make.

The high chair I designed and made for my little sister’s baby doll was a hilarious failure, made well only by copious amounts of duct tape. But the stones I hauled out of the creek made a mighty fine pathway which still stands today.

1998 — a Pentium II and a one-way ticket

Here’s where a little luck and whole lot of hard work came in. In 1998 a friend loaned me a Pentium II with Photoshop 5 installed on it.

Sweet. I dug into it with obsessive curiosity. Another friend put a one way plane ticket out west on her credit card for me. I crashed with friends and eventually ended up in San Francisco just in time for the DotCom Boom.

Places like WebVan and ActionAce.com were clamoring for anybody who had computer skills and knowing Photoshop was golden. I started by temping, then in 1999 landed my first real job as a Web Designer at Astrology.com.

My first user test, 1999

Somewhere along the way, I had caught a lecture about user testing; and it was the first time I heard someone suggest that we get other people’s perspectives on what we were making. This was my lightbulb moment. Get outside perspectives to make better websites, of course!

So when Astrology.com struggled to sell astrology reports, we looked at drop-off points and worked to fix the checkout flows. But it didn’t have a real impact on conversion. So I proposed that I do user research. The owner said, “Sure why not kid?”

My first ever user test in 1999 was a friends-and-family study with each participant going through 120 minutes of task analysis, participatory design, card sorting and a questionnaire. I’m sure the lovely gift basket honorarium made it worth it. Looking back I’m sure my methodology was loose, my findings were rife with confirmation bias, and my questionnaire results had a huge margin of error. But my study revealed one really big and really basic thing: our users didn’t know what astrology reports were. This made selling reports a little difficult.

To solve this problem, we promoted celebrity examples of our reports like the hugely popular Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise Love Match Report. Since I was 22 at the time and we didn’t have a lot of structure at Astrology.com, I don’t have exact KPIs for the lift. But I do recall that the user research and example reports were a huge success. And I got promoted after that.

THIS LEADS US TO THE PRESENT

I have drive, focus, resilience and above all, humanity. Growing up in poverty gave me the soul-deep knowledge of what it feels like to be dehumanized. I can feel it again with how some view AI. There are some who see the risks AI poses to humanity — worker displacement, mental health costs, safety failures, environmental degradation — and think, “Oh well, that’s the cost of progress.”
“The cost of progress” is a poor excuse for the loss of one’s humanity.

Those of us who are tech leaders have a responsibility to usher in technological progress that works in service to humanity. We are in charge of our future. We get to decide if we are going to design friendly helper robots or humanity-replacing overlords.