Anthony Devin Medeiros

My arrival was unique, not that it was remarkable, but the location had nothing to do with my upbringing. The U.S. military saw fit to grant my mother birthing rights at one of their establishments in the English countryside, one that flew planes carrying bombs. My stay lasted two months.

I was moved from the pastoral landscape of my birth to the heavy gray and wet that is the Pacific Northwest. This is my home where I have not thought it necessary to leave.

In short, my father pushed sports as a rearing strategy - I pursued this dutifully. I even gained some skill before the din of coach ranting convinced me that another occupation was in the offering. It would take several years.

I pursued other things then, music and writing. I played the piano, and I thought I might write music. I studied with a modern composer, whose credentials were completely unknown to me. After three months of atonal study, invented scales, and general dissonance, orchestral work seemed suited for strictly modern composers. I had talent for orchestrations but there was little purpose in them beyond Hollywood.

It turned out poetry and short story writing are something I also did well. I can claim only one 4.0 during college. It was poetry. My poetry was free form, no forced meter, just the cadence and onomatopoeia of the words. It was wonderful.

I was pushed from the department of English then, not because I had completed all the credits, but because I ran out of Federal grant and loan money. They waived the remaining credits and gave me a rather smallish but leather-bound binder stating I received an English degree.

The world received me shortly after, but not so openly as to allow my writing skills a livelihood. No, the world's agenda was skewing along another vein which I was yet to discover.

Multimedia was the word they used when I walked into my first computer store. I was astonished that the gray/white box displayed pictures that were almost photographic. My prior computer experience consisted of word processing with green letters. I was hooked - the sound sucked, but I was hooked. I made up my mind to paint there. So, I did.

I ran into others who wanted to paint there too, and we rented a house together and called ourselves a business. I was abruptly educated.

There were things like marketing, contracts, financing, functional specs, usability, and project management to name a few. It was incredibly fun and frustrating, but it was the lifestyle for me at the time. I loved it.

Then an amazing and well-funded visionary named Walter Forbes (no, not the "Forbes," but wealthy nevertheless) wanted to build the first online shopping mall. Soon we had an online bookstore, travel store, auto store, auction house, everything under the sun store, and more – 14 in all. A little accounting snafu in a merger transaction ended his career and mine. I moved on to the B2B space.

The B2B boom was even shorter than B2C but ended at roughly the same time. I experienced the world of mergers, corporate raids, rejiggered business models, and shuffled staff and roles for the next 8 years. The world where I grew up was replaced by social media and digital marketing. It didn’t fit, but I managed on for another 15 years while raising a family.

And so, I'm here - hoping to return to my roots and utilize my writing skills to help drive the use of AI as a tool for business.