I want to take a bit of a detour down memory lane for a minute. It ties back to entrepreneurship and learning, so things will make sense at the end. These memories vastly pre-date this blog and my official journey in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Iowa and beyond. However, the skills I used when I first launched my career were generated in the mid and late 1990s, sitting in the middle of what once was a library and is now an auditorium in, at the time, a brand-new school building full of ninth graders.
A few weekends back, I had my twenty-five year high school reunion. Roughly 100 of my former classmates showed up that weekend, either to one of the parties on Saturday or to the tour of both high school buildings on Sunday. I hadn’t seen many of them at all in the last twenty-five years because most of them didn’t attend The University of Iowa in the fall of 2001. Most of the people with whom I spent time in high school stuck closer to central Iowa, or headed for institutions on the coasts. A few that attended college with me became better friends in college than they ever were in high school.
There were a few people there with whom I’d completely lost touch over the last couple of decades. My best friend from ninth grade on had removed himself from social media before I got married in 2009 – he had no idea that I’d gotten hitched, and it wasn’t to the girl I was dating toward the end of undergrad. Years ago, he and I were going to create a cartoon based on the (mis)adventures we experienced during our time in marching band. I still have some of the digital assets he created years ago, and on some hard drive somewhere, I have a bunch of the audio recordings and Flash animations that we made to go on a Web site that we never finished.
That’s where the story truly starts – in ninth grade, we decided to build a Web site on this relatively new invention called “the Internet.” You may have heard of it at some point. 1997 was the era of mostly plain text pages, due to the limitations of dial-up modems. I did not have access to the Internet at home until senior year of high school, so all of the things I built had to be uploaded at school or at the city’s library – buildings that were both a short bike ride from home in the warm weather or a shorter car ride in the middle of winter. The school’s library was the place where I did most of my work, learning everything as I went.
We built our first Web site on a service called FortuneCity. I don’t remember much about this other than the site was accessible by clicking on an image of a townhouse in a “neighborhood” similar to Geocities. I also remember signing up for an email address on Lycos in order to create the account on FortuneCity. The school district gave everyone their own email accounts, but I wanted something external for my various Internet shenanigans. The FortuneCity site did not require much HTML knowledge, but later sites did.
I built Web sites for people on Angelfire and later Xoom.com, due to the latter’s 100 megabyte storage limit. I was starting to add a fair number of graphics to my personal Web site, so the extra space came in handy so that I didn’t have to register a bunch of separate free accounts. I didn’t exactly have access to a credit card while in high school, so a paid account was out of the question. Storage space around the year 2000 was still incredibly expensive as compared to the present day.
During my senior year of high school, I was asked to serve as the Webmaster for our school’s radio station, mostly because I was the only deejay who knew how to build and manage Web sites. In 2001, I proposed streaming our programming online but never got that approved due to the high cost of doing so in 2001. Our station’s site was originally built in Microsoft Frontpage, which added a bunch of proprietary junk code – I spent a few days cleaning up the mess before updating the entire site. I had a box full of floppy disks with HTML and JPG files and a mission during the summer of 2000, and I did a good enough job that my work – both on the Web site and on the air – was used well after I graduated, until at least 2003.
I look back at the Web sites I created over those four years and the media I created while part of the school’s radio station quite fondly. They form the absolute foundation for my entrepreneurial journey. At the time, I thought that I’d end up in medicine – I knew that I wanted to help people, but couldn’t quite put my finger on what that meant. It turned out that the help I was best able to provide was not as a physician, but as an entrepreneurial ecosystem builder and an entrepreneur – terms I didn’t hear for the first time until well after high school. The resources to guide young people toward starting businesses that exist today were not even a twinkle in someone’s eye in the late 1990s.
Over the following years – four years of undergrad, two more for graduate school, and three years working for the Institute for Public Health Practice – I was able to improve on what I’d built during high school. I gained digital video production skills and improved my audio production abilities. I started playing with Flash animations during freshman year in 2001 and ended up becoming the “Flash guy” right around the peak use of the technology at the end of the 2000s.
It was during and after my time at the Institute for Public Health Practice that I realized my skills had monetary value, and was the time when I first heard about this concept called “entrepreneurship.” At this point, I had about fifteen years of projects under my belt, most of which I’d saved on a series of floppy disks, Zip disks, and hard drives sitting in a drawer at home. Most of the story from this point on has been written in this blog or discussed in other venues – from hourly employee, to freelancer, to founder and ecosystem builder. I wouldn’t have traveled the country and the world over the last few years had it not been for the foundation built in the libraries of both the freshman building and the main building of my high school.
As part of the reunion, we were able to tour both buildings. I hadn’t set foot in either since graduating in 2001. Much as the Internet has changed over 25 years, so had the buildings. It was amazing to see what had changed and what hadn’t – the Quarter Mile Hallway had been shortened when the oldest parts of the building were demolished, but the band hall looked like it hadn’t been touched since my days as a mediocre percussionist. Most of the freshman building looked the same, except for what was the library. The radio station was in the oldest part of the main building prior to that wing’s demolition, so it was relocated, enlarged, and improved. In the parts of both buildings that hadn’t changed, I could feel a sense of connection. The memories flooded back.
During the weekend, I really felt young again. I thought of all of doors that had opened over the years, some of which had opened when others closed. Things don’t always progress in a straight line – each curve along the path builds character and generates a story. I had some great conversations with former classmates about their journeys over all these years. Many of them hadn’t drifted far from central Iowa, while a few made the trip for the weekend from all corners of the United States. I didn’t end up leaving the evening party until the bar started kicking everyone out after last call.
On the drive back home Sunday afternoon, I had a couple of hours to think about the weekend. Most of the people who I considered “friends” in high school weren’t at the event. None of the people who have spent the last ten years or so as depressed and angry keyboard warriors were there. The Internet isn’t real life, and those who need a healthy dose of reality rarely venture outside the warm and cozy confines of the bubbles they create. For those of us there, it was great to be able to reminisce with a few jokes at the expense of those not present. Those who were there renewed my drive to finish those creative projects that were started years ago. The hard drives are still there in my desk drawer.
The committee that planned the 25-year reunion is already starting to plan the 30-year reunion in five years. No doubt that we’ll all be a bit older and some will be a bit grayer. A few people will be there that weren’t there this year, and others may not make it. Unless something drastically changes in my life, I intend to be there, doing my best to pretend that I’m a teenager again. In the next five years, I expect a few more curves in the road – 2026 has already been pretty curvy already.
Whatever happens in those next five years will make me better. That’s a promise.
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