Life

Melanie teaches kindergarten in the Greenfield-Central schools. We have three boys, Baron, Conrad, and North, seventeen, sixteen, and thirteen.

Melanie took the job in Greenfield while I was at DePuy up in Warsaw, so we bought a house in the area. We spent ten years in a neighborhood, then built our own place on three acres, closer to the country without leaving town entirely. She is a city girl. This is our happy medium.

It has been a good place to raise the boys. They have real outdoor responsibilities and enough room to do whatever we want without the usual limits of a subdivision.

All three boys are deep in soccer, with track and basketball around the edges, so most Saturdays are multiple games in multiple places.

When we are not running to practices, Melanie and I are in the garden. Large flower and vegetable beds and a small orchard. We hit the local farmers markets when the schedule allows, and we like having people over.

When you start a company you fail constantly, in small ways, all the time. The goal is to learn from each of those small failures so you never take the large one. People always want the story about the single catastrophe. There isn't one, and that is the point.

I test what is working and what is not, more or less continuously. I worry about failing, which is most of why I work hard and try to work smart. Failure keeps happening inside successful businesses. You just have to be durable enough to outlast it.

Five times now I have built a function that did not exist yet. That is a preference, not an accident. I like jumping into the unknown, where there is no process and no standard, because it gives you the latitude to try anything that might work. Then you iterate, and iterate, and iterate until something does.

It is not that I enjoy creating process. What works first is never the scalable version anyway. Get it working as a human first. Then figure out how to tell the machines to do it.

I went to Johnson & Johnson out of Notre Dame because I wanted to see how a Fortune 100 actually operates. I learned how a multibillion-dollar company strategizes and focuses, what it takes to make physical products, and what it takes to become an expert in a field you previously knew nothing about.

I always knew I would end up back in small companies and startups. That is where the energy is, and it is the kind of people those companies attract.

I am building a gardening app. It is for Melanie and me, nobody else. It tracks what I planted, what worked, what did not, and what I want to do differently next year.

It is a strange pleasure to build the thing you wished existed for years and never had the ability to make. It is also the only product I will ever ship where I do not have to listen to anyone else's feedback.

I read about fifty books a year. The podcasts are in steady rotation rather than picked over, and between them they cover most of what I think about during a week.

Social media is nowhere near my comfort zone, so I have been making myself get better at it, automating large chunks of it and trying to find a voice that is actually mine and actually worth something, rather than one more talking head.