NPR INTERVIEW


SEVENTEEN YEARS OF ONLINE SUCCESS

I scraped together my first page of HTML at Indiana University in 1994 with the help of a few friends and half a dozen books the size of telephone directories. My animated GIFS were the envy of the internet. I launched my first web dev company the following year and was working in the Windows Media Group at Microsoft by the end of 1995. After leaving Microsoft in 1998, I created Overdrive Media, a company that mixed web dev with the burgeoning streaming media industry. Having created a successful syndication system that received great evaluations from an analyst at Jupiter, we thought we were well on our way to Internet Millions by the end of 2001. A culmination of Napsters attack on online audio profitability and the dot com crash left us decimated a few months later. We shut Overdrive Media down, and I shuffled between various web dev companies, B grade ad agencies and assorted contracts. The result of these experiences was the launch of ArtSchoolsDigital.com - a site that served the Art School verticals. ArtSchoolsDigital.com grew rapidly and garnered widespread attention. Before selling the site in 2007, it had become the second most-trafficked art school site on the internet utilized by hundreds of thousands of art students.

I then worked in the Gamehouse division of Real Networks for a few years. I built web sites for video games including brands such as MTV, South Park, A-Team, and NCIS. I did end-to-end design and development and had a great time. I won Site of the Day twice. In the last few years I've focused more on move and responsive React work. I released a very successful package of web templates, prototyped a simple JQuery/HTML5/Canvas game engine and created online interfaces for various types of software. I am at my best when building big brand sites that require an extensive knowledge of design and development.