The first web company. Quincy, Illinois. 1996.
I hand-coded HTML on a Tandy. Learned style sheets before most people knew what CSS was. Built over a dozen websites for clients — WGEM-TV, Coris Inc., one of the Midwest's first LAN gaming companies. The colors were purple and green. The Internet was the future. Life was easy. Nobody knew what this was yet.
Iris Group was my first company. I was 24 years old and I could build anything you could see on a screen. But I couldn't keep a server running in Quincy, Illinois, on a dial-up connection. That problem would come back to define everything.
In 1998, Motorola hired me away. They needed someone to build their global web presence for the CGISS division. I managed a team. I set UI standards. I pioneered Flash media with Double-Click Networks before banner ads were even a thing. I learned what enterprise-scale looked like.
But I didn't learn the lesson yet. That came later.