/ser·en·dip·i·ty/: the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.

For the last fourteen years I have been helping people make sense of technology. Sometimes I’m focused on marketing, or sales, or management, or even state government. There has always been one constant- my ability to bring together multiple disciplines of thought to synthesis a solution to a business problem.

But I can’t take all the credit, as serendipity has influenced my life (and career) as much as deliberate achievement.

1984: Introduced to Apple II computers in my 4th grade classroom.
1985: Wrote my first program in BASIC. An animated ball of light!
1986: Dad purchased a Commodore Vic 20.
1990: Entered and won an AutoCAD competition in the 11th grade.
1991: Introduced to the Mac IIsi at ARCO Oil and Gas as a high school intern.
1993: Purchased my first Mac- the Mac LC III as a sophomore at UT.
1995: A friend told an Apple recruiter about me and drug me to the job fair.
1995: I got my first official job in technology at Apple in Austin- legacy technical support.
1995: Several friends went to Power Computing, the first Macintosh OS clone maker. They encouraged me to follow. (My interview was literally in an elevator!)
1996: I met Chris Heatherly and Shannon Swenson. We launch our first web-based database applications and enjoyed our first roles as project managers.
1997: Steve Jobs returns to Apple, buys back the Mac OS license. All employees laid off.
1997: Shannon and I are foolish & lucky enough to start Stream Studio Web Architects. We become life-long entrepreneurs.
2004: I became a network manager for the State of Texas.

If you take a high level view of my personal timeline, you’ll see that I came of age right in the middle of the PC boom, and the internet explosion. Did I plan that? Of course not. But did I take advantage? You betcha!

So what’s next?
Social networking, blogging, web 2.0, mashups…

I can’t wait!