I get excited about the ways culture happens, both historically and today. My interest in the past focuses on art and literature, but in the 21st century, it’s the transformations driven by technology that fascinate me.
I started my professional training working towards a PhD in Comparative Literature, but I left the academy because I was captivated by the Internet and wanted to get in on the action. I soon found myself working for Microsoft writing whitepapers about “in the future streaming video will be the primary way people consume entertainment; CEOs will use it for live company meetings with their global workforces; it will be foundational to learning and training.” My first product manager role was working in streaming video, and I’m fortunate to have been involved in those transformations and to have seen, first hand, how such changes evolve.
For the next phase of my career, I jumped over to the entertainment side of video to work at RealNetworks managing the Big Brother live feeds. Our customers were reality tv fans who paid $15 a month to watch the live video coming out of the “house” at CBS studios, and they watched a lot—an average of 23 hours per week. I have a ton of interesting stories from that experience, including producing our own call in shows bringing fans and stars together. One of the most interesting things about that work was moving the business from a legacy, on premises infrastructure to the cloud. At that time, AWS was a brand new thing, and I didn’t fully appreciate how ahead of the curve we were. Our inspiration was more along the lines of “necessity is the mother of invention.”
I returned to Microsoft to work on delivering video based technical training to developers at the same time that Azure was coming into its own. Again I was fortunate to play a hand in delivering technology that dramatically changes our culture. The shift to cloud computing has accelerated change so rapidly that now technologists struggle to explain new capabilities even to other experts; the pace and scope of change has also made helping business leaders to envision new possibilities an even richer challenge, as well as helping them to articulate what they truly need so that technical solutions can be found.
In this context, my background as a poetry translator is still the biggest asset I bring to a team. I learned how to understand creative intentions and techniques in one language and to convey the same artistic experiences in another. Today, my most exciting work is connecting experts in technical areas with experts in business. I help them understand each other by conveying the creativity and innovation of one field to another. Those connections spark inspired innovation and big changes.