How I got here…

I have been building computers and teaching myself software since I was nine years old. If you’ve gotten to know me, you might have heard me say that. It’s an easy way to explain something that has followed me through nearly everything I’ve done: when I encounter something I don’t understand, I tend to take it apart until I do.

I learned HTML in fifth grade in computer class when we had to build a website entirely from code. I coded mine at home in one night and saved it to a floppy disk before bringing it to school the next day. I loaded it up, showed the teacher, and was free for the rest of the class. So I started helping my friends build theirs so we could get on to other fun stuff.

Around the same time, I took apart my first computer, a Dell, and put it back together. In true modder fashion, I ended up with a few extra screws, but it still worked. Before long I was rebuilding it inside a Thermaltake case, replacing components, cutting into the case with a Dremel and modifying the cooling system. Eventually I posted the finished computer on Twisted Mods and found myself holding my own in conversations with people who really knew what they were doing. I was hooked.

Then I found Photoshop and started making logos, forum signatures and anything else I could think of. I still use it today. Looking back, the websites, computers and design were all versions of the same process. I wanted to understand something well enough to make it my own.

College expanded that process. I had English 110 with Professor Jendian, and he was not easy to impress. He was adamant that every word in an essay, every word on a hotel placard about towels, and every word in an advertisement had its place for a specific reason. He drilled rhetoric into us. “If you don't study rhetoric, you will fall victim to it” is something I still hear in my head from time to time.

At the time, I took the trolley to work and it dropped me near a Barnes & Noble. I had some time to kill one day, so I wandered into the philosophy section and picked up Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric. That led me to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and much further into philosophy. I became especially interested in Socrates through Plato’s Apology. What stayed with me was less any single philosophy than the habit of questioning assumptions and trying to understand how people arrive at what they believe.

At Saint Mary’s College of California, Professor Kolhede recommended during my first semester that I become the Business Administration tutor. I was the only one for my two years there and regularly tutored classes I was actively taking. Teaching became one of the ways I learned. If I could explain something clearly enough for someone else to understand it, I understood it better too.

My perspective has also been shaped by a pretty international life. I’m a Swedish citizen, spent part of my teenage years in Munich and later worked in Abu Dhabi. Being around different cultures and ways of thinking taught me early that context matters. People can look at the same situation and see something completely different.

My career has given me the same kind of education in a much larger system. I started in banking as a teller and worked across personal, small business and commercial banking before moving deeper into complex implementations, product delivery and operations. In small business and commercial banking, I spent a lot of time helping bankers uncover opportunities, build their business acumen and become more confident in what they were doing. I was teaching, but I was learning from them too.

Today I spend a lot of time working across teams that can look at the same problem very differently. I often end up somewhere between those perspectives, understanding enough of each to connect them. Sometimes that means getting deep into a client or product implementation. Other times it means understanding how the work is actually being done and finding a better way to do it without losing the judgment or controls that matter. More recently, that has included helping explore where AI can actually be useful inside a bank, where it is not, and what still needs to stay human.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

— Steve Jobs

Jobs was talking about a calligraphy class he took simply because it interested him, with no obvious reason to believe it would ever be useful. Years later, what he learned about typography helped shape the Macintosh. I understand the feeling. Taking apart computers, teaching myself software, building that website in fifth grade, studying rhetoric and spending years learning banking all seemed like separate things at the time. They don’t anymore.

I still learn pretty much the same way I always have: follow something that interests me, pull it apart and keep going until it makes sense. The tools have just gotten better. AI has accelerated that process enormously, but I’m deliberate about how I use it. That is especially true when I’m coding this site or working on my own projects. I use tools like Codex to help me get unstuck, learn commands and understand better ways to structure what I’m building, but I try not to let it do things I don’t understand. If something changes and I don’t know why, I stop and figure it out. I want AI to help me learn faster, not remove the need to learn.

What it has changed is how quickly I can get far enough into something to really understand it. I can get deep enough into an API, database, interface or workflow to understand how the pieces work together and build something around them. I can work with developers when the technical depth goes beyond mine while still understanding what they are building and why. Then I can step back and think about the customer, operations, economics, governance, reporting, design, the people who have to use it and whether we solved the right problem in the first place.

At this point, I’m less interested in fitting neatly into one discipline than I am in understanding how all of them work together. The whole kit and kaboodle.

I don’t know exactly where all of that leads next. I do know that I want to build and run businesses that work well, and be the person people can count on when something needs to be fixed, simplified or made better. Whether that eventually means building something of my own or helping run something bigger, I’m less concerned with the title than the work itself. I think that’s kind of the point. The dots will make sense looking backward.