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| On the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA |
I was born in New York City back in 1983 and I grew up next door in
NJ. Eventually, somehow, I ended up in
Seattle, WA working at Microsoft, which is about 3000 miles west of NJ. If you asked me as a kid where I would
someday end up living, never in my wildest imagination would I have thought it
would be so far from home.
Growing upI was a very curious boy growing up. There were many different areas where I focused my time. I really enjoyed playing sports, like basketball, soccer, and baseball. I also liked hanging out with friends, watching movies, experimenting with photography, and listening to music. Out of all these interests though, I really think I had some strong potential in basketball. I was quite skilled. Believe it or not, I was actually once able to slam dunk the ball. I even beat a guy playing 1:1 who ended up playing professional basketball. Looking back, I think if I devoted more time to this hobby, I could have ended up working for another organization, a little smaller than Microsoft, called the NBA.
The family computer
All kidding aside, my father bought a family computer, and immediately
my interest shifted from basketball to this amazing new device. Not long after purchasing a computer, we also
signed up for the AOL, which at the time many people thought was the
internet (and unfortunately some people probably still think AOL is the internet). Of course, the first thing I
did was enter a chat room and spend countless hours talking to strangers about
nothing, but I found it most entertaining.
First web development job
After the chat room novelty wore down, I became intrigued in developing web sites. I advanced quickly
and eventually started building web sites for local businesses. The first business I designed a site for was
a local restaurant called Sirin Thai, a thai restaurant in Morristown, NJ.
The great thing about building web sites for restaurants is that
when you have a meeting with the owner, you get the delicious opportunity to sample the food, a nice perk of the job. Unfortunately, none of
the customers I work with at Microsoft are in the food business. Sirin Thai was facing a business
challenge. Customers would call to look
at the menu before coming in. Sirin Thai
would then fax the menu to the customer.
This was a very resource and time consuming process. I convinced the owner to build a web site
with a menu on it, which eliminated the need to fax the menu to customers. The business owner was thrilled and thanked me.
I felt really smart that I just made a big one-time fee for
putting together this web site. Then I
started thinking about it… I would probably never get another payment out of the
customer unless they needed periodic maintenance. What I needed to do was host their web site to
keep making recurring revenue. This
marked the beginning of my web hosting business.
My own web hosting company
At 15 years old, I launched my web hosting company eMegaWeb.com and
immediately people started signing up.
To this day, I still have no idea why these people signed up for a
hosting company run by a 15 year old high school kid. I had people sending me checks for hundreds
of dollars in the mail to host their sites.
Some customers who called me were surprised when they heard my high pitched voice on the phone, but I always said “thanks for the compliment, but don’t flatter
me, I sound younger than I am”.
At one point, I received 5-10 orders a week and eventually
gained up to 120 customers from all around the world. Running the business was great
experience. It exposed me to finance,
marketing, accounting, and other business areas.
Applying real-world learning to school and positioning myself for work
It was also great in school, because I could apply
classroom learning to the real world.
For example, I once had a server problem and customers became very
upset, and rightfully so. Typically, the
first customers to call were the ones who ran the cat web sites. They wanted to know why the pictures of
Muffles, their cat, were not showing up.
Luckily, I was taking a business communication course at the time, and I
was able to craft good messaging explaining the situation. This helped me diffuse a potentially damaging situation.
Running my web hosting company exposed me to both business
and technology. I really had more of a
passion for business, and that helped make my decision to study business in
school. When Microsoft came recruiting,
I thought it would offer the perfect continuation of my interest in business
and technology, but with more of a focus on business. That led me out to the west coast and a
career at Microsoft. Now when I answer
the phone, I hopefully no longer sound like a 15 year old kid.
