brinking - nabeel hyatt: Five things you didn't care to know about me

Apparently I have done something to offend Bijan, since he has tagged me with this "fun" little game where I am supposed to tell you five things that you probably don't know about me. This is hard, because I don't know "you" at all. For instance sometimes my wife reads this blog, and I'm not sure there is a whole lot left to tell her.

But I will assume "you" means the unwashed masses, so here goes:

1 - I lied about my age to my employees. I started my first company at 16, it was an ad network for BBSes. Within a year I had about 25 freelance employees working for me, and most were in their twenties or above. All business was conducting over the modem or phone so no one ever knew my real age.

2 - I ran away from home at six years old. We lived in Bangkok at the time, so you could imagine how my parents felt about their son and his friend disappearing to go live on their own in Thailand. We had packed two bags of cheetos, two juice boxes, and a deck of cards for our journey. Meanwhile my folks were frantically calling the American Embassy and having visions of us being sold into slavery.

We wandered down the railroad tracks through shanty towns until we got hungry and thankfully some kind Thai homeless women helped us get home.

3 - I have never broken a bone. I got hit by a car when I was 12, and broke both the front windshield and the back windshield with my head -- but I didn't break a bone.

4 - I went to art school. After studying computer science at Purdue I felt like the right side of my brain had turned to jelly. Everyone recommended business school next, but I felt like that would probably only exacerbate the problem. So instead I went hardcore right brain and found the most conservative art school I could, the kind that doesn't let you touch a keyboard or use colors the first year.

It taught me a ton about how to be critical of yourself, and it explains my freakish familiarity with a letterpress and affection for books like The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization.

5 - I wanted to be a film titler. Extra points if you even know what that is. During art school I fell in love with the typographic work of Saul Bass (his title sequence for Otto Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm is amazing in its clarity) and Kyle Cooper became my hero. The mixture of business challenges, creative challenges, and engineering challenges inherent in title design seemed perfect for my disposition.

Unfortunately I was running a startup company on the side and right after I graduated I received an acquisition offer. So I took that instead and entered the wild world of tech startups.

Just like every fabulous chain letter scheme, I must now tag five people. I really wanted to build a Touchgraph of all the links in the chain since Pulver -- but then I got busy so instead I'll just rip off from Jason's 19-degree history, starting from the bastard who tagged me:

Bijan Sabet -> Howard Lindzon -> Roger Ehrenberg -> Kris Tuttle -> Mike Herrick -> Patrick Logan -> Dan Creswell -> Steve Jones -> Brenda Michelson -> Anil John -> Pete Lacey -> Richard Monson-Haefel -> Karen Hobart -> Peter O’Kelly -> Irwin Lazar -> Phoneboy -> Ken Camp -> Andy Abramson -> Jeff Pulver