50
6 min readSep 29, 2025
- 50 is a big number. Half a century.
- Every new lap is worth celebrating.
- Wasn’t sure I was ever going to make it. Having a big health scare at 12 made me feel lucky about every year.
- And gosh I feel lucky.
- At 50, I look ahead and get to (mostly) pick what I want to do most with the rest of my life.
- Be with family. Hang with friends I like. Go places I want to. Work on things that are fun to work on, and good for the world.
- Or at some point not even work, just help.
- I have gotten to go to many amazing places but still have a long bucket list.
- Still need to visit Pyramids, Easter Island, Swiss Alps, Fireflies in Tennessee, Swim with Manatees in Florida among many more.
- Most fantastic places I have been are Torres del Paine, English Lake District, Amalfi Coast, Saguaro NP, Santorini, Kyoto, Kangaroo Island, Doubtful and Milford Sounds, Redwoods NP, Niagara Falls, Lake O’Hara, Carrizo Plain in a superbloom. Can remember a moment or two in each so vividly.
- Have had so many memorable meals. Sometimes it’s the food I remember, most often the company and the conversation.
- But my favorite food is still just a perfect carne asada burrito with guac, rice, mild salsa, rice, no beans from the local taqueria. La Costena in Mountain View is still my fave but several near me are great.
- I have lived in Kent OH, Tacoma WA, New Haven CT, Palo Alto CA, Bellevue and Seattle WA, Mountain View CA.
- I always thought I would live more places by now. I had a big relocation when I was 8 and that would be a pattern I’d follow. But things have been good and we haven’t felt a need to move much. There’s still time.
- I have never had “cool” music tastes. But now I embrace them. Growing up I listened to mostly classical.
- I also played cello from 3rd grade through college, and many of my best friends in that era came through orchestra.
- My music tastes have expanded to indie folk (eg a singer and their guitar), a capella, acoustic covers. I have a playlist called My Mix with all the songs I like. I play it on shuffle and feel good with every single song that pops up. 1315 songs and I add more when I hear them.
- My favorite artist is Joshua Radin. First discovered his songs on the TV show Scrubs. Have all of his songs in My Mix.
- I also really love listening to Broadway musicals. And have gotten to see original cast of Rent, Titanic, Spring Awakening, Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, Come From Away, Maybe Happy Ending. Will aim to keep expanding this list.
- My lack of mainstream music knowledge caught up to me on Jeopardy!
- Growing up, trivia was a huge hobby of mine. My high school knowledge bowl team won our state tournament 3 years in a row. Getting to appear on Jeopardy! was living a life dream quite early. Also a good lesson in dealing with public awkwardness.
- My favorite TV shows growing up were all high school dramas — Beverly Hills 90210, Dawson’s Creek, Glee. The first season of 24 was amazing and friends used to gather to watch it live.
- More recently, I have loved For All Mankind, Succession, This Is Us, Only Murders in the Building.
- My favorite movie is still Goonies.
- I also really liked Avatar. The ride and land at Disney World made me appreciate the brilliance even more. (I really enjoy Disney as an adult).
- Family matters. I feel lucky to get to 50 and still have both parents, wife (of just over half my life), brother who lives nearby, and a great kid all in my life.
- Could be better at spending more time with all of them and telling them how important they are to me.
- Trying to make more effort on that. One thing I encourage anyone who got this far to do more of! Time is finite and Tim Urban’s post is a great and harsh reminder.
- His post also talks about sports and I am a huge Seattle sports fan. Growing up it was the Seahawks, Mariners, and Sonics.
- The Sonics ditched Seattle for Oklahoma City and I am still mad about that and don’t follow the NBA much more.
- But for the Seahawks and Mariners — I am a deep fan, even when living in the Bay Area. In my lifetime there has been literally one championship between them.
- The Seahawks won the Super Bowl in 2014. I would have gone but it was outdoors in New York. In February. TV was much warmer. I went the next year when they returned to the Super Bowl and lost to New England in the last minute. Fun to go but ugh. Mariners — well maybe this is their year.
- When I got to college, web browsers were just becoming a thing. Mosaic — before it became Netscape.
- I realized this was a wave to get on.
- The objective on my college resume was “To create great technology that changes people’s lives”
- If I could write it again — I would say “improves people’s lives”. Technology is net neutral and can change lives for better and worse as we have seen. It is up to us as humans to focus efforts on making lives better.
- One thing I realize looking back is how easy it is to focus on benefits and be naive and even ignorant of negative impacts and externalities. As products reach billions, even a 1% issue can affect tens of millions. This is important and something I wish more had focused on earlier. And with each new wave, we make similar mistakes in the race to get to benefits quickly.
- I always made my career decisions based on wanting to work on a product that I thought could be a lot bigger and more valuable in the world.
- I interned at Microsoft during college (the summer they launched Windows 95 which was huge!!) and saw how small roles could be at a giant company. Most of the summer I worked on a custom chart gallery for Excel.
- So I decided I wanted to try smaller companies thinking this was a great way to have impact.
- I started out at RealNetworks (was Progressive Networks when I joined, about 300 people) with the dream of putting audio and video on the Internet. This was about 28 years ago. We did the first streaming of a baseball game. I listened to a game on my phone yesterday.
- Then I moved to the Bay Area and got enamored with the idea of a people first internet. “Social Networks”
- Again I got really lucky to get work on several of them in their early stages. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Very proud of the work I got to do at each in a critical time for the growth of the networks and platforms. And they all turned out so much bigger than my dreams. Though I now think Twitter could have been even bigger!
- But if I am being honest with myself, I wish I had chilled out and stayed longer at each job. Growing with a company that hits escape velocity is a rare thing in our tech industry. There have only been dozens of these opportunities across my entire career.
- Lots of reasons why I moved around quickly (1.5–2.5 years) but a lot of it comes down to my own impatience — thinking I deserved more credit or bigger roles and could get it faster at the next one. My one advice to my younger self would be when you get into a great rocket ship, appreciate it and do all you can to add fuel.
- Given my experience, I thought I would really enjoy being a VC! I feel again very lucky to have had that opportunity and got to become part of a number of incredible companies at key stages, bringing both investment $ and advice. Discord, musical.ly (now TikTok), and this here Medium are just a few of them.
- Gosh I have been so lucky to see all of this across our industry.
- But what I have realized I enjoy most is making stuff with great people. I’ve found more satisfaction in product management vs other roles. I even wrote some thoughts on product management many years ago that still ring true today.
- Life. Work. Hobbies. Friends. Travel. Free time. Love. Family.
- First 50 years have been incredible. On to the next!
