So I’ve been tagged by Eli White, who’s about to become a former co-worker for the second time (a weird fact by itself). The idea of the game is to come up with seven facts (if they’re strange, humorous, or embarrassing they probably make the game more fun) about myself, and then tag seven more people (a la Charles Ponzi) to do the same. Perhaps my ego is out of control, or my social life has completely imploded, but I think I’ll find it a lot easier to come up with seven facts about myself than to find seven people to tag. But here goes…
- I lived in Pakistan as a teenager, where I attended Lahore American School for a year and a half. During that time I visited many places that are now Al Qaeda country.
- I have 3 university degrees (BA, B.Sc., MBA) but also spent time in 2 other programs without getting a degree. I spent about a month in an MA (English) program before running away, severely frightened by the prospect of learning about the “Feminist dialectic.” I also spent 4 years in a Ph.D (Management) program and completed everything but my thesis, before running away, severely frightened by the prospect of endless years of postdoc poverty ahead.
- The first computer I ever saw was a Timex Sinclair TS1000 that a friend of my father’s brought by our house and let me play with. 2 hours later I gave it back to him in a non-functional state.
- I like to golf, badly, and generally have trouble breaking 100. However I have been known to drive the ball prodigious distances, often resulting in phrases like “Holy Cow” being uttered and total strangers coming up with complementary nicknames for me like “Big Guy” or “Boomer.”
- I was co-founder/original coder of digg.com, and own a significant amount of shares. I’m still waiting…
- I’m currently no. 62 on the Hacker News leader board, largely because I like to gripe about my treatment at digg, and generally suggest that I wish we had been reddit. Not because of the aliens, but because of the lack of VCs and “professional” CEOs.
- I have white hair
. When it’s not completely shaved that is. I started going grey around the age of 18.
Now the hard part. Coming up with 7 people I know who – a. blog, b. talk to me, and c. aren’t sanctimonious prats – is going to be challenging. Here we go…
Joe Duck
Michael Marshall
(is it hot in here?… feels uncomfortable… can I tag the person who tagged me?…)
Dan Haubert
Edit:James Tauber
Ian Bell
(Help…)
Thomas Hawk
Ray Slakinski
As expected that last part was challenging. I am slightly chuffed that I was able to come up with 43 out of 7 that I’ve actually met in person.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Unknown user // Jan 5, 2009 at 7:57 pm
I do believe you are misrepresenting yourself on your blog, Owen. You should really be honest with yourself and tell everyone the truth about your stay at Digg. Kevin hired you as a freelancer to write the code for the site, later hiring you full-time and offering you equity (<5 percent). You became frustrated with your coding being rewritten by other (more senior) developers and later left the company. Since your departure all of your code has been retired and rewritten.
I’m not sure why you choose to alter the truth, but you should speak with a professional about these internal issues. We liked you, but you spreading false information is getting around the valley, and just makes you look foolish.
2 Owen // Jan 5, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Thanks for actually joining in the discussion, something that its been difficult to get others to do, but whoever “notforpublishing@anonymous.com” is, I doubt you were there. There is some truth to what you say, but I’ve generally been open to discuss the ambiguities of the early days of digg in an honest, forthright and truthful way, something neither Kevin or Jay have been willing to do (and in my opinion they have consistently made an effort to misrepresent things to the press). If you care to actually use a real name, I’d discuss it further. Just to correct some of the misunderstandings in your comment, my equity share was larger than 5%, and I certainly didn’t get frustrated at more senior developers rewriting my code, in fact I tried to be open and fair and help out; As a holder of significant equity, my main goal was to move the company forward in any way I could. I only got frustrated when it became clear that my equity was being treated differently by management from equity of the exact same class of shares. To quote my lawyer, “what they did wasn’t illegal, but it certainly was unethical.”
3 Training // Jan 22, 2009 at 9:49 pm
[...] 2 day long sessions about providing feedback to employees, something the laughable (and anonymous) comment here reminded me of. Just for the record, there was never any attempt made in providing feedback to [...]
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