Although Aisha and I started out living in Silicon Valley, after a point it made more sense to move fifty miles north to San Francisco. By that point, both of us were commuting from Santa Clara to our San Francisco jobs. There was also the fact that Aisha had grown up in North Bay and her grandma, great-grandma, and great-great-grandma had established a cumulative 150-year family history in the city. Aisha felt very connected to it and, because of her, so did I.
We first rented a home there in 1999, at the peak of a hill by an elementary school in Miraloma Park. Back then, the market was nothing like it is today, but it was still tight and expensive. It was jarring for someone like me, who had grown up in a place like Eugene, where the homes were cheap, big, and set on an acre or two of land. Here, the row houses were all connected. There were no front yards or backyards. And they wanted how much for rent?
At the time, we didn’t need a ton of space. It was just Aisha, me, and our two cats, Nimmus, which is a play on a word that means “tiger” in Arabic, and Roni, a small calico. Very soon after moving to San Francisco, Aisha and I decided to add an English Labrador to our family. We found a breeder in Sacramento and went down to visit a litter of puppies. Through the fence, we saw this one little puppy running around with a big old belly and what looked to be a little limp. We felt sorry for him and decided he was our guy. Miraculously, by the time we got him in the car it was as if the limp never existed. We named the puppy Keyser Söze after Kevin Spacey’s character in The Usual Suspects. Keyser Söze spends the whole movie limping due to an alleged handicap, until the final scene when he walks away limp-free. We spent a lot of time with the now-limpless Keyser Söze at the baseball field by our house that doubled as a dog park.
Despite the fact that it took me a while to get used to the fog that came rolling off of the mountain and hit our house with huge wind pressure nearly every evening and the ever-increasing rent in our ever-dilapidating house, San Francisco was a great place for a young couple. We went out to nice dinners, had great friends, and Keyser Söze very much enjoyed the huge dog population around us. We often went to Crissy Field to see the Blue Angels fly or to Fort Funston on the beach to let Keyser run wild, while Aisha and I enjoyed the ocean breeze and the sand dunes.
When Aisha became pregnant with our first child, we realized it was time to start thinking more seriously about our future. Part of this involved buying a home. The process of coming to this decision resulted in one of the biggest arguments Aisha and I had in our early marriage: to buy or to keep renting?
For as much as I was horrified by the price of renting and the small space all of those dollars got you in San Francisco, I was even more horrified at the cost of buying a home. Instead, I suggested that we move back to Oregon or continue renting. Aisha was insistent that the money we spent on a house in San Francisco would be the best investment we could possibly make. I told her she was wrong and that prices would never be this high again. I think we all know who was right in the end.
We put offers on six or seven houses and went all out in the process—we wrote letters to the sellers, telling them who we were and why we loved their home, and included pictures of ourselves and Keyser. Nothing worked and we were exhausted with the process. We were outbid by another buyer on every offer we made. It seemed impossible to compete with our budget. We grew nervous as each day was one day closer to our baby being born. Finally, an offer was accepted. We moved into the house one week before Aisha went into labor.
Our home was a row house with a nice little yard, built in 1936. With its solid wood beams, it felt like it was built to last two hundred years—even here in earthquake country. We were told by an elderly neighbor that during the Great Depression, many unemployed tradespeople took to building homes, so the homes built in this era were unique in quality and craftsmanship.
Our new home was in the Mission Terrace district of San Francisco. It was nestled on a nice clean street in a very residential neighborhood. To the west was a police station and large indoor swimming pools with an expansive park and a kids’ playground. We were just one block removed from San Francisco’s famous Mission street to the east, where there were a ton of coffee shops, Italian delicatessens, and wonderful Mexican food. To the north was Glen Park, a neighborhood we often frequented for La Corneta Taqueria, the grocery store, and BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit).
When Aisha and I made the decision to purchase a home, we also made the decision to purchase it based on the buying power of just a single income since our new baby would arrive shortly and just one of us would be working. It just wasn’t clear who would be working. Aisha’s career as an engineer was just as successful as mine, and she was making a few thousand dollars a year more than I was. I told her I would be more than happy to quit my job and be a stay-at-home dad—and I meant it. It sounded like a great scenario to me. I loved kids! When we were in high school, Aisha’s mom ran a daycare center out of their family home and I loved hanging out and playing with all the kids there.
I went to my boss and told him I was seriously considering changing gears to be a stay-at-home dad. “You can’t do that!” he told me. “You have an incredible career in front of you.”
“So does Aisha,” I replied. “Why should she give up her career? And she’s making more money than me.” This wasn’t meant as a negotiation tactic but, nonetheless, I immediately found myself in an unanticipated situation.
I went home that day and told Aisha, “Hey, I’ve got some bad news.” She looked at me, clearly bracing herself. “My boss gave me a raise.”
We both laughed, and Aisha decided that she would be the one to stay at home. For us, the most important thing was that one of us was home with the kids. Plus, neither of us had the burning desire to be a high-flying executive. Since then, we have been absolute partners in every work decision I have ever made or critical situation I have been faced with. I value Aisha’s feedback more than that of anyone else in my life.
I was so excited to meet our baby. I started eating better, because I wanted to be in the best shape I’d ever been in when the baby arrived. I talked and sang into Aisha’s belly so that the baby would recognize my voice. When I saw the first ultrasound, it looked like a little monkey with a little monkey hand. Every week I looked forward to the Yahoo! baby calendar email update, which explained how our baby was developing. Aisha and I went to birthing classes in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco and met with a doula who helped us understand what to expect when the time came for our baby to make its appearance. (Oddly enough, there was another Stephen Gillett in the birthing class, which I had never encountered before.)
In early May 2002, our first child arrived in a room overlooking the panoramic view of San Francisco at UCSF Medical Center. We named her Leyla Pauline Gillett.
Aisha had decided ahead of time that she wanted a natural birth so, when the time came, she was induced and had no meds. She was a soldier. For as tough and resilient as I consider myself to be, I could never have done what Aisha did that night (and has proceeded to do many times since then). So, I did what little I could. I printed out her birthing plan ahead of time and hung it up on the wall so that I could be a good advocate.
Before you have a kid, it just seems like a normal thing that happens in the course of life. After all, there are kids running around everywhere. It’s not until you have your own that you realize how overwhelming the miracle of life and love really is. Not to mention the beauty and strength of women for creating and bringing life into the world. I remember reading a book called The Prophet by the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran many years earlier. In the moment I met our first baby, its passage about children really hit home:
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
In that moment, I was overwhelmed by the power of love, marriage, the divine soul, and life. It all suddenly made more sense to me.
When Leyla arrived, I was hit with an overwhelming rush of responsibility to take good care of and provide as best I could for my wife and new baby girl, our new family. I don’t think it was until that moment that all of the things the priest had told Aisha and me before we got married really clicked into place and made sense in a profound way. I learned in those pre-marital counseling sessions that the word husband is derived from the word houseband and refers to the fact that as the primary provider, it is the husband’s duty to bind the house together. Likewise, wedding bands symbolize that bond, as well as the unity of two people and the ultimate creation of their children.
Before, all of this had been an abstract thought. Then, suddenly, when Leyla arrived, I felt the beauty, wonder, and humility of it all in an overpowering way. While I now know what to anticipate with childbirth, the joy, rush, anxiety of wanting a healthy baby, and total amazement of it never ceases to floor me, every time a new little human being of ours enters the world.
Aisha and I had picked out potential baby names while she was pregnant, but decided to wait to choose one until we met the baby. We named Leyla after my aunt who lives in Lebanon; she is my dad’s older sister, and the second-oldest child in his family. The name translates to “night.” When I went to Lebanon for the first time in 1995, I spent time with my Aunt Leyla, my Uncle Kheir, and our extended Lebanese family. I always thought her name was beautiful and Leyla herself is also beautiful in every way. Pauline is Aisha’s grandma’s name and we wanted our first daughter to carry that name.
Leyla’s sharp, piercing blue eyes caught me off guard. I had assumed that she would have darker features and brown eyes like me. I learned that for a child to have blue eyes, each parent must carry the gene; that means this surprise can be attributed to the combination of Aisha and my mother’s European heritage.
From the get-go, Leyla was very independent and self-sufficient. She went on to be a strong student who speaks three languages: English, French, and Mandarin-Chinese. Leyla has traveled the world at a young age, whether for school, accompanying me for work events, or on family vacations to places like Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Monaco, China, and Lebanon—all before age sixteen!
Leyla is the oldest in our family, and that comes with the responsibility to help and be an example for the younger kids. At Leyla’s parent-teacher conferences, the teachers always loved Leyla as both a student and a person. All of her teachers always commented on how outgoing, fun, and smart Leyla is. This always perplexed Aisha and me a little bit, since we get a more reserved version of Leyla at home, but we also know that home is a safe place where Leyla can just relax and be herself.
Leyla has a strong appetite for learning and desire to expand her horizons on all fronts. It would not be uncommon to find Leyla practicing complex music on the grand piano in the living room or playing online video games downstairs with her LED-lighted headphones. She also loves playing lacrosse and volleyball at school.
As I write this book, Leyla is in her junior year of high school and about to turn seventeen. My “baby” is now driving her younger brothers to school in the morning in my old Jeep Rubicon. I am exceptionally proud of the young woman Leyla is becoming and of her mix of academic accomplishment, commitment to being a good big sister, and her aspirations for her life.
For as young as Aisha and I were when we had Leyla, we were considered very young to be having our first child in San Francisco, where most first-time parents were a decade or more older than us. Despite this, we had been together for so long and had accomplished so much in our life together that it felt like the right time. In fact, it felt so right that we didn’t wait long to have our second child, a boy who we named Aidan.
My first son arrived in November 2003, just eighteen months after his big sister. I was scared to cut the umbilical cord and so nervous in the process that I cut it outside of the clamps, rather than inside like I was supposed to. This is very dangerous, because it lets a lot of blood out fast. That was the first and last umbilical cord I ever cut.
As soon as we saw his red hair, it was clear that our new son’s name was Aidan, which means “fiery one” in old-world Irish Gaelic. On the night Aidan made his appearance, we were having Thanksgiving dinner at Aisha’s grandmother’s house in San Rafael, just north of San Francisco in Marin County across the Golden Gate Bridge. The evening was going well, with lots of extended family, food, laughs, and good conversation. The turkey had just been served when Aisha said, “We need to go to the hospital!”
As a child, Aidan was incredibly sweet and sensitive, always very in touch with his emotions; in fact, he reminded me of the emotional kid I had been. Like Leyla, Aidan has had the opportunity to see many different parts of the world at a young age. He is a digitally creative kid and loves streaming his online game play and posting digital creations to his social network pages. You can often find Aidan in his LED-decorated room, with a boom microphone close to his face, streaming his online gameplay and providing commentary about the moves and plays he is making. At night, I often receive texts from Aidan, letting me know he is going to check on the cats or make sure the dogs go out for one last bathroom break. Aidan is an aspiring athlete, who now starts on his football team in high school after a long run playing baseball in middle school. As I write this, Aidan is fifteen. While he has definitely flexed his teenage muscles by exploring our parental boundaries, he has also held on to all of these wonderful qualities I’ve seen in him since he was a little kid, which remain some of his biggest strengths to this day.
Spencer followed not too far behind, arriving in February 2006. He decided to take his time arriving. Aisha was finally induced ten days past her due date, and Spencer arrived at nine and a half pounds. Everything about him was big. He was the first kid that actually looked a lot like me, which I thought was very cool.
Spencer was a great young kid, always happy and playful. He really looked up to Leyla and Aidan. At age thirteen, Spencer is now a young man in so many ways. It is common for Aisha and me to be sitting in the living room, wondering where all the younger kids have gone, only to go downstairs and find Spencer playing with them in pretend forts and castles or find them outside on the swings or playing with the dogs, without ever needing to be asked.
He is an avid reader like Leyla, and whether he is eating, driving with us to the store, or waiting in the theatre for a movie to start, you will find him with a book in hand. Spencer reads a lot of the same books I loved when I was his age, as well as so many more than I ever did. Spencer is a kind kid, a natural leader, and enjoys playing violin, piano, soccer, and football.
I have tried to steer all of my kids toward things I thought would be beneficial later in life. To teach them lifelong skills and habits and allow them to experience the things that I didn’t get to do. For example, when Leyla signed up for ballet, my sons joined soon after. Whereas Aisha and I struggled with second languages, all of our kids were in the French immersion program starting at a very young age. While I dabbled with the French horn in middle school music class, all of our kids can play multiple instruments.
As the older three kids have started to grow up, I can see how these activities have paid off. For example, Aidan plays guitar around the summer campfire and confidently dances with the girls at school events—they love it and I am sure he does too! Leyla can fill up a room with sound from her piano and chase down anyone on the lacrosse field with her speed and focus. She can live in France or China for the summer, speaking the language fluently and taking part in these different cultures. Spencer can play violin and piano, have the most exceptional goalie blocks and scoring skills in soccer, and always has a fellow teammate throw him the final shot ball before the clock finishes in basketball.
I want all of my kids to have the opportunity to focus on things that will set them up for a better life and to engage in activities they can continue to partake in throughout their lives, if they choose. I want them to stand out from their peers because they are well rounded, unselfish, confident, and have points of view they can share, even when those views are not popular. Aisha and I want the kids to know how to be empathetic with others and move about the world understanding different languages and cultures in ways that will add value and insight to their own lives as they become adults.
I think a lot of this desire to give my kids experiences I didn’t have comes from my dad and his old-world sensibility and my mom’s more traditional American upbringing, but I was also very inspired by an article I read many years ago. It posed the question: Why are all of the superheroes in movies primarily played by British or Australian actors? It pointed out that, in Australia and the UK, it is very common for young boys to dance and play in band, while also playing contact and aggressive sports like rugby. The boys are not ridiculed for participating in the arts or dance like they might be in America. The end result is these guys who can sing, act, and dance, but are also fit and athletic. Case in point: Hugh Jackman, the actor that plays the Wolverine character in the X-Men movie franchise. These men are well rounded in part because they weren’t peer-pressured out of the creative pursuits when they were kids. My boys were made fun of for things like dance, too, but I helped them through it because I knew they would reap the benefits in their older years.
Everyone has the potential to do extraordinary things in life and achieve more than they ever thought possible. As parents, we have the power and privilege of using the early years of our kids’ lives to help them find that purpose within themselves by exposing them to new experiences and allowing them to explore new frontiers on their own. Having a strong family foundation that is encouraging, supportive, and loving can be a launch pad for these young minds.
By the time Leyla and Aidan arrived, there was no doubt we were starting to outgrow our house. We had added a couple of rooms and a bathroom, but we were still living paycheck to paycheck since a family of five was being supported in San Francisco off of my single income. I started a small technology consulting business called ITSAINT to supplement my income. I had a few customers that I hosted email and websites for, and they paid me a monthly fee. The infrastructure to support this IT setup was housed securely in our garage.
Aisha pointed out to me that, while the inside of our house looked great, the outside could use some work. I used to describe the exterior of our home as looking like a runny nose, thanks to the constant wetness and humidity of the San Francisco fog. It wasn’t good, and it looked just like the other ten row houses connected on the street. Unfortunately, after the addition to the downstairs to make more room for our expanding family in 2005, we were nearly out of money to do any work to the outside of the home.
At the time, Aisha and I were really into the HGTV show Curb Appeal. “We should submit our house for the show!” Aisha told me one night. So, I went onto the HGTV website and submitted our profile. We didn’t hear anything back and I quickly forgot about it. Several weeks later, we received a note from the producer telling us they would like to redo our home. It goes without saying that Aisha and I were incredibly excited!
The producer came to our home with a camera crew in tow and asked Aisha and me what we wanted our house to look like. We looked at each other and shrugged; we knew we wanted something different, but hadn’t thought through exactly what that might be.
“Hey,” the producer said, pointing toward the fireplace mantle, “is that your wedding album?”
We nodded.
“Would you mind if we flip through it for some inspiration?”
It was in that album that the producer ran across pictures Aisha and I had taken on our honeymoon in an old Italian village. Behind us were Tuscan red houses with pavers and murals and patina copper staircases. It was beautiful, quintessentially old-world Italian architecture. “Why don’t we turn your house into something like these Italian homes?” the producer asked.
It wasn’t the worst idea.
The producer borrowed some pictures and came back with a plan a week later. Over the course of the next few months, he and his crew proceeded to turn our San Francisco row house into a beautiful Italian villa home, which was also inspired by the French Countryside style we liked. I would come home in the evening after work to find a camera crew waiting to get my response to the pavers, patina copper, new gate, or whatever else had been changed and installed that day. The HGTV crew also took a cue from me and installed lots of techie features like a thumb reader activated lock to access the downstairs from the street and high-tech security cameras. Right before our very eyes, our runny-nosed row house was transformed into an incredibly upgraded and beautiful home we couldn’t have been more proud of.
I stepped into my first public-company vice president role soon after I began working at CNET, where I was quickly promoted from a director position. I was only twenty-six at the time and found myself in a position that required managing a whole range of issues in a public company. Many of these issues were far outside the narrow scope of technology I’d been dealing with so far. This range might involve anything from making important business-related decisions (rather than just technology-related ones) to managing people and situations I hadn’t yet encountered.
For example, one day I got to my office to find an invitation to an addadicktome party waiting on my chair. A what?
I went to the employee who had left the invitation for me, and asked if he was okay. “Are you having something done to your appendix?”
“No,” he laughed, shaking his head. “It’s an add-a-dick-to-me party.”
This employee was fully transitioning from female to male. In the early 2000s, this procedure was far less discussed and much rarer than it is today. So rare that the employee had to go to Belgium to have the surgery.
So, here is a tech guy dealing with very delicate interpersonal issues, leading larger global teams, and dealing on a day-to-day basis with everything from company culture to business, to the financial impact of technology decisions, little of which I had encountered in any sort of meaningful way up to this point. I felt like I had good natural instincts, but I also lacked formal training. This was particularly true in situations that required significant financial or business-impacting decisions, like whether or not to build a new data center or expand our technical teams into a new market. I discussed my situation with my manager and, based on his suggestion and my own research, I decided to get an MBA, which would cover many of these business areas and be a nice opportunity to complete my education and help me build the confidence to lead in non-technical areas as well. In fact, my boss agreed to join the program with me. He later backed out, but I kept on going.
I enrolled at San Francisco State University, which was right down the street from CNET. I took a little more than two years to get through the program on Tuesday and Thursday nights, as well as an all-day session on Saturdays. It took a lot of time, energy, and money to complete, but it was well worth it.
It was a great cohort, and a strong program. I learned a lot because I was directly and immediately applying the things I learned to real-world issues at work. The MBA turned out to be yet another case of serendipity in my life because the program happened to be sequenced in such a way that the timing of the concepts aligned with the timing in which I experienced those very issues at work. Because of this, my retention rate of the broad range of knowledge being taught and discussed in class was high. It felt like a major advantage to be in a situation where I could directly apply what I was learning, as opposed to being a twenty-two-year-old kid straight out of undergrad, trying to grasp these MBA concepts without having ever encountered them in the business world. Unlike my average undergraduate career, I was an honors-level graduate student, and voted most likely to succeed in my cohort. When I compare my MBA experience to that of my undergraduate experience at the University of Oregon, I’m amazed by what a difference five years can make.
Obtaining this MBA wasn’t part of a carefully crafted plan, but it ended up being an important tool for me as a new leader. I now had the combination of a strong, broad MBA to complement my self-trained trial-by-fire technical skillset. It turned out to be a potent combination. My MBA helped give me a broader view of how business operations work and how technology enables business, as well as an understanding of how finance drives key decisions and how innovation fosters a culture within which all of this thrives.
Most of all, the MBA gave me a new sense of confidence. I now felt like I had a set of refined tools to draw upon as a leader whenever I was asked for input on big issues like opening new offices, acquiring companies, developing talent, getting into new markets, and understanding financial impacts within the business. To this day, getting my MBA is the one good decision Aisha credits me for. “That was all you,” she often says. This is really saying something, considering we had three kids at the time, which meant a lot of extra responsibility fell on Aisha’s shoulders.
I also changed jobs during my MBA years as CNET was struggling and there were rumors that they was going to sell (later, they did to CBS, at which point CNET became CBS Interactive). I had several opportunities coming at me and was eager to find a more stable company. The two companies I was talking to were Yahoo! and a newly public IPO company, Google. I was in talks with the CIO of Google to join his team, leading key components of IT, also known as CorpEng. I really enjoyed visiting the Google campus, and had the chance to interview with leaders such as Alan Eustace, the senior vice president of engineering who later achieved a world-record for the highest-altitude free-fall jump.
Simultaneously, I was talking with Yahoo! about taking on a senior role in engineering operations. The two companies could not be more different. The CIO at Google was hard to pin down on what exactly the role I was being considered for would involve. It seemed to be more of a talent grab than anything else since there was a lot of opportunity within the growing company. The Yahoo! interviews were much different. Yahoo! was more deliberate and looking to expand its business from web to entertainment. During these talks, I would head to Sunnyvale after a day of work in San Francisco, and meet well into the evening with people like Yahoo! co-founder and billionaire David Filo and the hiring manager, who was eager to bring me on board.
I remember one evening in particular when I rushed down to Sunnyvale. After a couple hours of conversation, Dave Filo asked if I was hungry. I told him I was, and he left for a few minutes, then returned with a handful of hotdogs and buns. We sat there eating them as we continued interviewing. I was impressed by how cool and down to earth he was.
I called my boss at CNET, who was disclosed on my conversations, and asked him what he thought about the two opportunities. He told me that Google was already a public company, so I had already missed the IPO. He also believed that the fact that they only did search made them a “one-trick pony.” Yahoo!, on the other hand, had a broader and more diversified business.
I ended up picking Yahoo! and history has now judged both my former boss’s advice and my decision. Although still a friend, he is no longer my career mentor.
Over the last thirty-five years, my gaming has evolved all the way from playing King’s Quest on my parents’ original IBM PCjr to Atari 2600 to Xbox to PlayStation and Wii to PC gaming and online worlds. As each new technology has arisen, I’ve adopted and tried to become an expert at it. My platform of choice today remains PC.
As if three kids, a new job as a public company VP, and obtaining an MBA wasn’t enough to keep me occupied during this phase of life, it was also during this period that I became a world-famous gamer, at least in the media.
When the internet incubator that I worked at, 12, collapsed right after the turn of the millennium, some of the early executives still needed IT support, but without the company operating and providing those services, were at a loss. They asked me to be their remote IT guy—to make sure their BlackBerry handheld devices and the servers that powered their personal email and websites were up and working. I agreed to help, and set up their data center in my garage. I continued to be their IT guy for the next thirteen years. They initially paid me about $400 per month, and gave me a check for several thousand dollars to buy all the necessary hardware to set it all up.
In the capacity of this consulting gig, an executive I met early on at 12, Dr. John Seely Brown (or JSB, as we all call him), came over to my house because he wanted to move his data from an old laptop to a new one. JSB is a very impressive guy—a PhD, social scientist, and engineer who ran the iconic Xerox PARC in Silicon Valley.
“Hey, I just have to complete this guild raid,” I told him when he arrived. “Just hang out while I finish.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” JSB replied. “But take your time.”
As a social scientist, JSB was fascinated to sit back and watch me coordinate this World of Warcraft raid with dozens of players, in a tightly scripted engagement, using voice chat tools and a web browser language translator to make sure the non-English-speaking members of our raid got the right directions for the boss encounter. JSB soon stood up from the couch where he had been sitting and stood over my shoulder, watching every single second over the course of the next thirty minutes.
“I’m so sorry,” I apologized when we finally finished the raid, victorious.
“No,” JSB said, leaning forward. “I don’t care about the laptop data transfer. Tell me everything you were just doing.”
So, I told JSB all about the World of Warcraft game, how we were trying to defeat a very difficult boss, and about our in-game guild, with hundreds of players from around the world. I explained that defeating this boss would increase our guild achievement and was something we had been working on for months. I explained to him what we were using open-source voice chat technology to interact in real time, and that each of the dozens of players in our raid had a specific task that I monitored via their stats on additional third-party tools to make sure they were doing their role correctly. As a raid boss and guild master, my primary duty was to coordinate the encounter. My number two guy was a Puerto Rican waiter in New Jersey, and number three was an ER doctor in Memphis. Although we never met, the three of us spent many years on conference calls and plotting out guild activities, in the course of which they became two of my best virtual friends. I don’t even know their real names. While I did not think much of all of this at the time, JSB was blown away by the complexity and global nature of it.
JSB then explained to me how unique and special the skillset I had acquired through gaming was. He talked about how it had shaped my thinking, confidence, and—as he called it—questing disposition.
“I don’t know even know what you’re talking about. I’ve never thought of my gaming being anything more than just that—gaming,” I told him. Man, was I wrong!
The next thing I knew, JSB had brought a communications professor from USC into the conversation to do a study on guild masters and gamers, and to deeply understand the social dynamics of what I was doing in the game. The end result of this was an article they co-authored in Wired magazine entitled “You play World of Warcraft? You’re hired!” The issue went on to profile me, my guild, and my game as being the most sophisticated they had uncovered. There were 12 million players in the game around that time.
When the article published in 2006, my profile in the gaming world went global. I started seeing my name appear in various online articles and blogs, and many players reached out to me via email or in-game. While we were by no means the top performing guild in terms of conquering in-game content, we did indeed have a very sophisticated guild structure, with set schedules, recruiters, a treasury, org charts, weekly leadership meetings, and even organizational charts with roles and responsibilities. I mapped out and documented a lot of this using Microsoft Visio, a tool that companies used to make visual charts at the time. In the years since then, I’ve done talks about gaming and made appearances at e-sporting events, and there have been dozens of articles about my gaming on CNN and in Forbes, Fortune, and Men’s Health.
As a result of this article, I started to try and capture the lessons I was learning in the online gaming world, long before I encountered them in my actual job responsibilities in the real world. Oftentimes, when a business book came out, I would write a sister blog post about it. For instance, when I read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team as part of a work assignment, I wrote a blog post called “The Five Dysfunctions of a Guild.” When I read about CEOs raising money for their startups, I would write about the difficulties of building a new guild in the virtual world and how that guild represents a lot of the pain points a CEO has to contend with. The more I wrote, the more I realized how much I had transposed from gaming to how businesses thrive, leadership changes, and, most importantly, group cultures are built and nurtured.
For me, there has been a sense of redemption in this acknowledgment of the power of gaming, and I thank JSB for pointing this out to me while waiting for his laptop to be fixed. Growing up, a lot of people thought that gaming was a waste of time. My wife did, too, in the early days of our relationship. There was no doubt that my early gaming was excessive in terms of time and distraction. Gaming ended up being a great training ground for participating in the emerging digital economy. I now understand that this is what JSB called the questing disposition. It’s about how you engage and solve real-world tasks, whether they are business, market, talent, or culture related, or just general leadership. The questing disposition is about mindset and overcoming challenges in these areas. In the end, gaming has been an asset for me, rather than a liability, as I moved through the corporate ranks to become a CEO.
Even with everything else that I have going on, gaming remains a big part of my life. In fact, it has been ritualized in my house. Whenever one of our kids turns eight, they get to sit down with Dad in his office and create their own Battle.net account and avatar. They get to join the family clan or guild and go to the big gaming conference BlizzCon in Los Angeles as a VIP guest. We spend a couple days at the Hilton hotel, swimming in the pool, eating at food trucks, and spending all day and night at the convention center, visiting gaming exhibitions, and watching gaming-related matches, streamers, cosplayers, and contests. It has become a rite of passage, and something that is mainstreamed in our house. We have some of the best memories from those road trips, too!
Gaming isn’t something that I do on the side or holed away in my office by myself. I talk to my kids about why it’s important and how it’s a platform for learning about teamwork and people. I’ve used gaming as a tool. Not only that, but it’s bridged a generational divide between me and my kids. Gaming makes me seem cooler to them, and my kids’ friends are always amazed that their dad is an avid gamer. I always say that families that game together, stay together.
All of this serves a greater purpose than just bonding time, though. As an early pioneer in the digital world, I try to understand where the future is headed. Within the next several years, gaming related e-sports will dominate every sports category in the world in terms of viewership. Much like we have football, baseball, basketball, and rugby teams in high school today, soon we will have e-sports teams as well, competing in their leagues for titles and championships. Professional gamers around the world can often make more than $500,000 per year. Fortnite, one of the biggest games today, has more than 70 million people playing it. That’s more than every ballet, concert, play, and sporting stadium event combined. A stadium full of sixty thousand people combined with at-home viewers watching the San Francisco 49ers doesn’t even come close to the millions of people watching the finals in e-sports. This is a global phenomenon that transcends country, language, and culture barriers, and I want my kids to be literate in the language and technology, and to understand both the benefits and dangers of it. I use multiplayer online games as a platform to teach them how to be leaders who are confident in the digital world.
This digital economy and the technology that powers it is their future.