My Second Career.

Growing up in Silicon Valley, computers were everywhere. While I was in music school, I needed to get a job to pay rent and such, and the position I found was working in a warehouse for a Taiwanese couple who had started the Mini Micro Supply Company, a business distributing computer parts in the area.

As their white guy (that's what they called me), I was mostly responsible for shipping and receiving and making deliveries. The job did not tax my brain, but I had a lot of fun packing boxes! This was in the early days of the personal computer, and it was very exciting to be involved - even as a delivery guy.

All the while, I was involved in teaching Drum and Bugle Corps and Marching Bands. This did not take up a lot of time (other than during the competitive season), so the job helped me live a bit more comfortably. Music (as all musicians know) never has paid very well.

One morning, my roomate Bob Callahan asked if I would be interested in taking on a temporary job in customer service at his company, MacMemory, a manufacturer of memory enhancements for the Macintosh. Being a big fan of Apple computers, I said yes.

I answered the phones and fielded questions about their new product, which boosted the Mac to a whopping 2 megabytes of RAM. Most computers nowadays come with 500 times that much memory, but it was a big deal at the time.

From there, I took a job at a music software company named Passport Designs as a product expert on music notation and printing software. That gave me the experience to land a job at Apple Computer's Claris Corporation as a Tech Support specialist.

On my first day at Claris, I reported to the receptionist, who asked me to take a seat. Right then, a group of employees appeared, leading a cow out of the building. It seems that the cow had been put into the office of one of the company's executives as a birthday prank. I knew then that I had found a home.

I stayed with Claris for almost ten years. From tech support, I identified that I wanted to move into training. You need to know that Tech Support is the kind of job that most people want to move on from after a very short time. People on the phone can be stupid and mean!

Training was a great job. I was able to travel quite a bit, as we had offices all over the world, training the Sales folks to better be able to convince customers to buy our products. We were a close-knit team, and our travels and trainings were legendary.

At that time, I began to notice that the Product Managers (PMs) in the Marketing department seemed to be the rock stars of the company. They led the teams that created the cool software that I was teaching the Sales teams to sell. I approached Mel Badgett, who was my Product Marketing contact, and asked him how I could become a Product Manager.

He told me that it would be easy, and gave me a bunch of his work to do for him! Luckily, my manager was supporting me in my quest to become a PM, and when a position opened up, I made the move.

This was my favorite time in the software industry. I was leading teams to design, develop, release, market and sell great programs. My software releases included ClarisCAD, MacDraw Pro, MacPaint, ClarisDraw, ClarisImpact, and Claris HomePage. My initial impression was correct - I was a rock star at the company, and I was truly enjoyed it.

But all good things come to an end. Steve Jobs decided that he needed to restructure the Apple software business, and one cold January day, Claris was dissolved. WIth almost ten years under my belt, I was looking forward to getting laid off with 6 months pay. But I was one of the folks chosen to stay. I was not happy about it and started to spend the majority of my time looking for a new job.

That new job was at Netscape. In the fall of 1998, I made the move. Netscape was taking a beating from Microsoft at the time, but I didn't mind - I was part of the Internet Revolution. I started as an International PM, and soon moved into the role of leading the marketing team for the Netscape browser group.

The Netscape team was very different than Claris. They were very intense and focused. Not quite as much fun. Or so I thought at the time - I learned that Netscape folks just expressed things differently. We worked hard, and I did some of my best work during that time. But it was not enough. Microsoft won the browser war, and our team was broken up.

During this time, Netscape was aquired by America Online. Many of the developers in our group were very unhappy about the aquisition. Netscape had always been known for innovation. AOL was known as the lowest common denominator of software. So, as their stock vested, people started to leave. My stock still had a few years to go, so I started looking for something new in the company.

My new role was to lead a team called Technology Evangelism. Because Netscape's browser had such low market share, many web devleopers had started creating sites that only worked with Internet Explorer. So, my group was formed to make sure that Netscape was not left behind.

Our charter was simple - to make more than 98% of the top 5,000 sites in the world work with the Netscape browser. We started by making the list, then testing all those sites. Our initial results were that we had a compatibility level of 67%, meaning that one third of the top sites did not work with our browser.

So we got to work.

My team included of 13 of the finest web gurus on the planet. We were spread across the globe, and pursued a strategy of fixing our product as well as fixing customer sites. Some sites were easy and/or cooperative. Others took a bit more time. Some refused to even try, so my guys would fix their sites FOR them. That way, when they told us they didn't have time to fix the problem, we could present them with a solution. For free.

At the end of 14 months, we acheived our goal, with 99% of the top sites in the world compatible with the Netscape browser. As a reward, my team was laid off and I was reassigned to the most boring job I have ever held (except for the time I was a bouncer in a Mexican Disco, but that is another story). That lasted until December of 2003, when I was laid off with about 400 others.

I spent the next few months interviewing everywhere. But there weren't very many positions open. This was a down time for the industry. After narrowly missing out on a dream job (running the team that produces Adobe Photoshop), I realized that my true dream job was to teach music. Leigh High School was the best music program that was open, so I took the plunge. And it was the best decision I ever made.

Except financially.