Faithful readers will recall that about three months ago, I announced my return to FM as CEO. I also mentioned that the projects I’d been working on – notably OpenCo and The Book, would have to be retooled given my new commitment to the company I started back in 2005 (when I last wrote a book). In the post, I wrote:
I love the book I’m working on, and I don’t plan to abandon it (I’m bringing on a co-author). And I love the conferences I do, and I’ll still be doing them (though I’ll be hiring someone to run them full time). But my first love is the company I started in 2005, whose story is not only unfinished, it’s at the height of its running narrative.
I’m very, very pleased to announce that I’ve found that co-author – her name is Sara M. Watson, and she’s simply the perfect partner for me to be working with on this book. You can read her post about it here. Sara and I met over Twitter, after she noticed the theme of the CM Summit – “Bridging Data and Humanity.” We spoke on the phone and I learned that the intersection of society and data was her passion – and that her background was an awful lot like mine. She started her career as a liberal arts major from Harvard (during the time Facebook was just a dorm room project), toiled in the narrative fields of enterprise IT, became fascinated with the story of information, and decided to head to graduate school to study it (she’ll finish her Masters from Oxford in a few months). After Oxford, Sara has some amazing plans lined up (I can’t talk about them yet) that dovetail perfectly into our shared work.
I started my career as a liberal arts major from Berkeley, wrote about enterprise IT for a few years, then followed my passion for the digital narrative into graduate school as well (also at Berkeley, the Oxford of the West, or perhaps, the Harvard – sorry Stanford!). My first project out of grad school was Wired magazine. Sara’s is going to be our book. I’m honored to be working with her. Last week in London I got to meet her for the first time and spend some quality time together.
The past 12 weeks have been a whirlwind, as I’ve gotten my arms around Federated, executed four conferences in New York, Cincinnati, and London, and lucked into finding great partners for the projects I’m passionate about. Not only have I found the perfect collaborator in Sara, I’ve also found a CEO to run OpenCo, which recently had an amazing London pilot and a successful debut in New York as well. But more about him later. For this post, I want to welcome Sara to the Searchblog community, and I expect the our partnership will result in a lot more writing coming through this channel in the near future.
Here’s a video of me talking about the themes of the book, and announcing Sara as well, at Le Web last week.
Onwards!
Welcome Sara!