Hi! Welcome to my first post (or newsletter?). It doesn’t have a name yet.
Maybe it never will.
I’ve thought about doing something like this for a few years, and it never felt like it was the right time. But the more I talked to people and the more I collected information about trends I’m seeing, the more I thought this would be a good way to convey information scalably and perhaps even start a conversation that can go a step or two further than LinkedIn posts could. So maybe, sometime in the future, the name will come.
In the meantime, I hope you will find the content here valuable.
What will I be covering in this newsletter?
To start, I’ll be writing my thoughts regarding what is going on with technology and consumer behavior. I thought a lot about what I have always liked and been interested in, and what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years – and it comes down to translating trends in technology and analyzing how people use it. And, maybe something that is written here could be helpful to spark some ideas for your own technology understanding or strategy. Right now, I’m just planning to write and see what happens.
So… subscribe if you want to stay in touch and follow me on this journey and (hopefully) learn some things in the process.
And if you want the TL;DR, read on if you want to know why I’m so obsessed with all of this stuff (it’s long, I know, but it was fun to finally get onto the page).
If you don’t read on, see you next issue!
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Do you remember the first time you got your hands on a piece of meaningful technology?
Do you remember how you felt?
If you don’t remember either of those circumstances, you probably weren’t as drawn to technology like I was. I grew up in an age where I went to a public school that had “computer class” taught by the former band-turned-computer teacher – in a specific classroom for computers. That class taught us how to use Apple computers (the IIGs computer that was big and bulky and had a cool click-y mouse). I loved it. I would purposely slow myself down in class so that I could spend more time with the computer.
Each classroom in my school also had one computer (Apple IIe) and I used to play Number Munchers and Oregon Trail daily. I just loved using the computer and missed it when I was on summer break.
And then the day came when, as a family, we bought our first computer – the IBM PS/1. I might have been in sixth or seventh grade. It was so exciting to shop for the computer and to envision the things I could do with it. I think we bought the computer, dressed it with a big red bow and “unveiled” it as a family on Christmas morning. (Thinking about that unveiling today makes me chuckle.) We moved it to a special room in the house that became known as the “computer room.” Each member of the family could use the computer for a purpose - turn it on to use it, turn it off when finished.
Maybe a year or two later, we received a CD in the mail (as was common those days). That CD offered a connection to Prodigy, an online service that was a web portal like AOL. I joined Prodigy and an entire dial-up world of the “internet” opened up to me. A few years later, I could use my Prodigy email address (I still remember it like I remember my first home phone number) to connect with friends of mine who went off to college. I could find information for school research via online encyclopedias. I could go to message boards and see what other people were saying about things that I was interested in.
I was hooked on the technology that was giving me connection to a world outside of the small environment I grew up in. And, I couldn’t get enough of it. I spent a healthy amount of time online. I wrote long emails to friends. I posted on message boards. I played online versions of “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”.
To my knowledge, I also was the only one of my friend group who used a computer as heavily, but not for programming. I constantly found excuses to use it, to want to be on it to do anything - create crossword puzzles and other games, design report covers on Print Shop Deluxe, help my Mom (painstakingly) write fundraising letters for organizations she was involved in. (And for me to listen to her dictate fundraising letters while I typed them, and to go through the torture of that process – it just goes to show that I would do anything to use that machine). I was attracted to the clicking of the keyboard… the hum of the fan… the transformation of taking something in your brain and putting it onto a screen and then having that idea manifest via the dot-matrix printer magically. I was mesmerized!
And it didn’t stop.
In the late 1990s, I went to college and brought with me a big tower computer – sometimes I used it in my dorm room and sometimes we went to computer labs to work. That computer in my room, though, connected me to the internet. I had access to the New York Times - I remember how I sat at my desk in my dorm room, in front of my massive monitor, when I read the news about Princess Diana’s death — on my computer. That beast of a machine also connected to our local university network and I could chat with my friends in different dorms on ICQ and AIM. I shared and downloaded songs from individual folders and also used Napster, of course.
I made a lot of money helping my classmates install their computers in their dorm rooms during move-in weeks. Somehow, I understood how computers and operating systems worked – enough to help my peers set up their computers and establish connectivity. Everything about the technology just made sense to me and that naturally helped me to help others.
I bought my first cell phone when I graduated. The phone wasn’t fancy and didn’t do anything special. But I suddenly was reachable anywhere. And over the years, I upgraded to the Motorola Razr and a few Blackberries before graduating to the iPhone 3. When new tech was launched, I wanted it.
I also didn’t get my first laptop until I graduated - a big, clunky thing that basically was a glorified storage mechanism for songs that I later would transfer to my iPod shuffle and later my first generation iPod. During graduate school, I bought another laptop – one that was smaller, but still clunky – and a PDA with a stylus so that I could start to carry my schedule and email in my pocket. Some of my classmates used laptops in class, most of them didn’t. None of them, to my knowledge, had a PDA.
(Are you seeing a theme here? A theme that is screaming “NERD” in capital letters?)
Bottom line - I always wanted the latest technology and I usually got it sooner than my peers.
And then I started working for Google. I felt like I hit the jackpot. I could see how I used technology and the internet and how others used it too, because we had access to internal tools that could show us how people were searching for everything. We saw it all. And then, in the mid-2000s, I felt like I was working for a company that was on the cutting edge of discovery and constantly launching cool new products. We were always “dogfooding” our own applications, so we had access to products and features before they were launched to the public. At the same time, I was trying to convince healthcare organizations to leverage Google to reach patients online (in the mid-2000s, let’s just say, it was a hard slog). In 2008, Google gifted us the Google G1 phone for a holiday gift, so I eventually replaced my iPhone 3 with this new Google device. And I guess I was off to the races… connecting technology and usage to healthcare, both at Google and eventually during my 8 years at Yext.
What’s funny about all of this is that I never got into programming. I programmed in Basic in middle school (anyone remember programming that little triangle “turtle” to move or to change color?). I took C++ in college and actually found the course to be one of the most boring classes I’ve ever taken (!). I like the use and functionality of technology, but (sadly?) never really got into the back end programming of things. I was always far more interested in how people used technology rather than how to create programs to use.
But the one common thread in all of this is that through my love of using this technology, I think I have a unique vantage point as a self-categorized early adopter – I am interested in the trend, see the trend and see the usage behavior to be able to translate it into how the trend will impact user behavior in industries. For almost 20 years, I’ve been doing this and translating the trends specifically for healthcare. There’s no better opportunity to help people find information than for their own healthcare, especially when they are in a critical life moments, sometimes even relating to life and death.
And we’re standing at a pivot point in time right now. It feels like the technology space is exploding right now. Generative AI, alone, is moving faster than anything I’ve ever seen, and I want to chronicle that motion and hopefully help to translate its impact. I’ve been having so much fun playing with the technology and thinking about what the impacts are on humanity, businesses and industries.
Join me at this party. It will be a fun ride. I don’t know where it will take us, but I am hoping we’ll all learn in the process.
Our first family computer was a TI-99 which waaaaay proceeds the Internet. My mother bought it instead of the requested Atari saying something along the lines that we will not have a computer solely to play video games in this house! :-D Of course my brother and I mostly just played games but she pushed us to more noble pursuits and it did shape my thinking and attitudes about the possibilities and purpose of these things from a very early age.