There’s a saying in business that “pioneers get arrows in their backs.” It’s meant to point out that there is danger inherent in being among the first to explore uncharted territory.

But after reading this article from the UC Berkeley Alumni Association, I felt more like a knife in the back might be a better metaphor.

Part of that article talked about the first e-readers being created by Cal alumni, but it had not one single mention of Geoworks Bindery. As the product manager of Bindery, I am deeply, profoundly, existentially miffed that this UC Berkeley Alumnus (and lifetime member of CAA) was completely ignored in the section on e-readers.

Great minds thinking alike

In 1994—three years before the companies mentioned in the CAA article were even founded—I was leading the launch of a visionary tool to create hyperlinked, multimedia electronic books that could be read on a variety of handheld devices.

Today, that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but remember this was in 1994, two years before the first Palm Pilot came out and less than four months after Amazon was founded. (Jeff Bezos wouldn’t become a millionaire until three years later, and Amazon wouldn’t launch their self-publishing service until 13 years later.)

Now, I get that the section on e-readers in the article is about the founders of Tesla and the battery tech they brought with them from NuvoMedia. And I get that I did not invent the concept of e-books. And I was just a product manager, not yet a founder (note the inclusion of Vouchsafe, Inc).

So I’m not trying to say that I should get my own article in California magazine. (Though, really, why wouldn’t they?)

I’m just saying that, in my career, I’ve spent time innovating on the cutting edge.

Memory lane

This whole thing got me running down the reminiscence rabbit hole. I have never been one to hold on to things, but I have kept a few trinkets. Such as

Geoworks Bindery allowed anyone to create electronic multimedia books for all those platforms as well as desktop computers. It really was a product ahead of its time, on a platform (GEOS) ahead of its time.

What’s the point of this post?

This blog is more than just a place for me to share wisdom and knowledge with the world for free; it’s also a place where you can get to know me.

Prospective clients often ask about my own life and work experience. Often, they’ve tried working with other coaches, and they quickly ran into limitations in the coaches’ ability to help them.

Many coaches cling to a small set of tools, methodologies, and assessments. Great coaching transcends methodologies because all models are reductive and flawed. They’re useful only when relevant.

A bigger part of many coaches’ limitation, though, is narrow or limited life experience. Some have been in one field or on one track their whole lives. Others simply haven’t gone through very much life yet. You can only lead someone as far as you’ve gone yourself; after that, you’re traveling together.

I love traveling alongside my clients and learning along with them. Lifelong learning is an important value of mine. But let’s be real—there’s not much value in hiring a coach who is starting at exactly the same place you are. Perspective, insight, and wisdom come from a broad diversity of lived experience, not from a classroom.

The more things change, the more people don’t

Today’s tech startup environment is in many ways completely different from the dot-com 1990s. In a lot of ways, however, it’s exactly the same. People don’t change that much from generation to generation; the mistakes, lessons, dreams, and heartaches of today’s startup world are still the same mistakes, lessons, dreams, and heartaches we went through in the 1990s. The same angst we hear today about AI taking all our jobs showed up as angst over the death of retail, publishing, and many other industries as we began to understand the disruption caused by that new “World Wide Web” thing.

Having lived through that heady time of disruptive innovation—the dawn of the internet age—I have a wealth of wisdom and knowledge about the startup space that people who only know me for my social impact, employee engagement, and nonprofit work might not understand.

Those insights, mixed and blended with all my other life experiences into a kind of magical, mystical nebula of wisdom, transcends any easily labeled set of problems a person might face.

So, that’s part of why I decided to post this this week. Also, it was fun digging out the nostalgia and revisiting that crazy part of my life.

And, maybe CAA will see this and decide that yeah, actually, they do want to write a whole article on me. After all, why wouldn’t they?

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