Okay, I'll take a shot at this. I'm a 45-year-old kid from just outside Pittsburgh, the offspring of a college philosophy professor and middle-school English teacher. I was one of the subjects of a research project by Carnegie Mellon University students in 1967 to see if children could learn to program computers (we could; now we can't stop). I was president of an Explorer Post sponsored by the Westinghouse Telecomputer Center. As such, I went to Washington, D.C. in May, 1972, to attend the National Explorer Presidents Congress. The conference included a trip to the White House, where Richard Nixon was supposed to greet us, but he didn't show up. Much later, I found out that it was the day he was first told about Watergate.
I'm a husband to Cindy, a wonderful woman, (step-) father to her daughter and grandfather to three kids (a boy and twin girls). Never would have guessed that little people would be calling me "grandpa" at this age, or that they'd be half Mexican. When I came to California almost 20 years ago, I joined a Lutheran church and have stuck with it for all those years. A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I couldn't come up with any reason to say no to becoming the co-chairs of the church's discipleship ministry, so we said yes. Cindy is the registrar at our church's school. We first met at the church on the morning I was meeting my best friend and his wife at the church to plan their son's funeral, after he lost a six-month battle with a brain tumor. I proposed to Cindy in the middle of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, where I was speaking at the third World Wide Web conference. Cindy took the picture of me with Tim Berners-Lee, on the Brin-L web pages, in Paris' city hall during this trip. After the conference, newly engaged, we spent a week with Jean Pelletier and his family. Jean was a 14-year-old boy when my father was stationed near his home with the Army Air Corps during World War II. They stayed in touch through the years; Jean became a pilot and recently retired from the aviation company he founded, turning it over to his son. The Pelletiers treated us like family; we got to experience France in a very special way. My nine years of French, from elementary school through college, finally came in handy. Employment: After a year in college, I worked as an EMT and paramedic for about five years, then returned to school and started working in radio news and writing magazine articles. In 1982, when Reagan was shot, I managed to come up with the first accurate account of his condition in the emergency room, contradicting the White House version. I fell asleep in the basement of the West Wing and got called on by Larry Speakes the very first time I raised my hand in the briefing room. Shortly thereafter, I was selling film, t-shirts and other stuff to tourists at Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park -- and doing lots of climbing and backpacking every weekend, which is the reason I took the job. The move to California followed the summer in Yellowstone. After a short stint as an editor for a market research firm, I became a reporter and then editor of the Los Altos Town Crier, a weekly community newspaper, while getting my pilot's license. Then I joined the San Jose Business Journal, from which I joined American City Business Journals' startup team, which sent me to Charlotte, NC, Columbus, OH and San Francisco to start newspapers. Somewhere along the way, I realized one of the goals I had in college, getting published in Rolling Stone. In early 1988, I joined InfoWorld, covering Apple, databases and magically becoming Robert X. Cringely when the "real" Cringe was out. After a year at InfoWorld, I launched Multimedia Computing Corp. with a friend, publishing an expensive industry newsletter. We also launched CompuServe's first multimedia forums and I began to learn what it's like to manage an on-line community. Did a fair bit of strategic consulting for top management at Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, etc. Sold the company in 1992, continued writing for it for a year. Traveling and spoke at conferences a lot, got to know many interesting folks, including Douglas Adams, Harry Anderson (who joined my advisory board), Todd Rundgren, Graham Nash (a subscriber!) and a host of computer industry people: Bill Gates, John Sculley (whose son was my first employee), Guy Kawasaki, Steve Jobs, etc. At some point, a venture capitalist recommended that I read "Earth," for a picture of what the world might be like. Loved the book. Dived into industry in 1994 to be Verity Inc.'s first Web product manager. Was one of the original W3C members, wrote a paper for the second WWW conference, "The Internet and the Anti-net," which David Brin liked enough to contact me and learn that it was influenced by *his* writing. Stayed at Verity through the IPO and beyond, managing most of the new products. Spent a year working from home, learning technical analysis, trading stocks while taking care of my father-in-law as he fought lung cancer. Soon after he died, took a position as vp of marketing at Invisible Worlds, which was started by some of the Internet's pioneers. That company moved much too far away for me to commute. Took some work I'd been exploring for a few years (forecasting by spotting opinion leaders in on-line discussions), turned it into a working prototype, launched Opion Inc. with a guy I met on the bus to Washington, DC, in 1972. Last spring, I left the company, extremely disappointed in said partner. The company couldn't raise any more money after I left; it apparently sold its assets to Intelliseek recently. Since leaving, I've been writing, arguing with Gautam, and have returned to strategic consulting. Right now, I'm working on the business plan for an Intel spin-out having to do with high-performance visualization. I'm also working on a book based on what we've learned at Plugged In, the community technology center where I'm on the board of directors. I'm also the chair of its facilities committee, which is overseeing the process of building a $5-$7 million new building. Whew. My best friend tells me that other people think I've either had a very interesting life or I'm a compulsive liar. Hey, I have *pictures*! And ADHD, which explains a lot. Nick
