The Story of Soren: Talk for the Explore Conference at Greenwich Country Day School

On November 27th, I had the great opportunity to be one of the speakers for the Explore Conference at Greenwich Country Day School in Greenwich, Connecticut. The event was the kick-off to their 6th-grade class’s capstone project: to work in a group on an idea aligned with their interests that does social good. I was asked to share some of my story, how I got from Divinity School to Soren, and some lessons that might help them as they embark on their capstone journey. It was a fun chance to get to interact with some great young people and tell a little of my story. Here’s the text of my talk:

Have you ever been asked this question: “if you could change anything about yourself, what would it be?”

I can give you my answer: I would change my clumsiness. Anybody else?

So one time, I was coming home from playing a musical gig near Boston. I was on the train, and it got to my stop in New Haven, and I got up and grabbed my guitar and my suitcase. I’m carrying them both in front of me like this, walking down the aisle. And I get off the train and I put my suitcase down (cause it has wheels, so why carry it?) and I go to stand back up, and I can’t. I’m stuck like this (bent over my suitcase).

Somehow, in the course of getting off the train, the little hook that holds the handle of the zipper on my suitcase had gotten hooked around something on my jacket. It took me a few seconds to figure out what the heck was going on, and then I’m standing there fighting with my suitcase zipper trying to get free so I can stand up again, and meanwhile the train is leaving behind me and I’m just there on the platform right in front of the windows bent over my suitcase, stuck to the zipper. And I’m sure that everybody on that train is thinking “what is that guy’s problem?”

Anything like that ever happen to you?

And the thing is, when that sort of stuff happens, I have no idea how it happens. It just happens. And, seemingly, I have no control over it happening. It just happens.

So that’s true of a lot of life, a lot of life “just happens” and we don’t have much, if any, control over it. Nobody decides where they are born, or when, for example. Nor do your parents decide that, by the way — our five month old was born two weeks early, and I can tell you, it just happens when and where it’s going to happen.

And likewise, you may or may not have had a say in deciding where you are going to school. And you definitely don’t get to control the assignments your teachers give you, right?

So one way of telling your story is about all the things that just happened to happen to you.

I was born in Tennessee, down south, because that’s where my parents lived. I went to public school there because that’s where my parent’s sent me. I thought, because my parent’s didn’t have a lot of money, that my options for college were either to have the military pay for it or go somewhere really small where I could get a full ride. So I did the latter — I went to a tiny little bible college in Alabama partly because I thought I was going to be a minister and partly because they gave me a full scholarship. Then when I was about to graduate from there, a professor told me “you should apply to Yale” for grad school, so I did. And somehow I got in and I said “how do you say no to that?” and so I moved to New Haven. And there, I met my wife and we both went on to get jobs not far from here in Westport, CT and then a couple years later she got a new job in Rhode Island and we moved and that’s where I live now.

Ok. Two things.

First, the way this story has been told so far it’s pretty boring, right? And partly that might be the subject matter, but mostly I think, it’s because I’m a pretty passive character in this telling of the story. Things are just happening to me, I’m not really doing a whole lot.

Second, even though a lot of stuff “just happens” to us, it’s not really true that that’s all there is to the story, right? We are, all of us, much more active players in our lives than that, whether we want to admit to it or not. And what I have found, and I suspect I’m not alone in this, is that the places I am most active are places where I find something really interesting.

When I was about you guy’s age, I was living just outside of Memphis, TN. And my family was really religious, which you might have guessed from me saying that I thought I was going to be a minister earlier. And we went to this church that was really contemporary. The kind that has a rock-band playing every Sunday morning instead of a traditional piano or organ. And when you have a band like that, there is usually a booth in the back where someone called the “sound engineer” sits and uses a huge control panel called a mixing board to balance out the sounds of the different instruments so that it sounds really good and not just like a bunch of noise.

I thought this mixing board was the most fascinating thing in the world. I wanted to know what every single knob and button and lever and dial did, what every light meant, whether I could launch a Russian satellite with this thing, whatever I could do. And so I spent a lot of time as a teenager playing with this thing, learning all that I could about it, and eventually becoming the main engineer at the church I grew up in and later on even getting paid to be an engineer for my college.

This wasn’t something that just happened to me, it was something that I really cared about, thought was really interesting, and so I put a lot of effort into it.

Similarly, when I was in college, I was a philosophy major, which is a subject you probably haven’t really encountered yet. It’s all about studying really abstract things like the meaning of life and how we even know whether or not the world is real or if we are all just living in a computer simulation. Sometimes the ideas and the concepts involved are pretty hard to wrap your head around, and I wanted to spend some more time thinking about them. So I started a blog as a way to “think out loud” about some of the things I was studying and wanted to understand better. It had a readership of maybe about 10 people, several of whom were probably related to me. But it wasn’t about how many people read it, it was about me getting a chance to practice what I was learning.

When I made this blog, it was really easy to do. I just signed up for a free WordPress.com site, picked a template I thought looked nice, and started writing. Three clicks and I was there.

Then, when I was in grad school I had an internship for a campus organization at Yale. They had a website that some volunteer had built a few years before. But nobody knew how to get in touch with that person anymore, so it wasn’t much help. And somebody said “can we build a new one?” and I said “sure, I can do that.” So I went back to WordPress.com and made a new site for this organization. But since it wasn’t just a blog, now I needed to know a little bit about how to arrange things on the page to make them look like we wanted. And so I started, slowly, learning how to use HTML beyond the really basics like “bold” and “italics.”

Then a colleague needed help putting together a website and some social media profiles to showcase a big trip he was taking for his work. It was supposed to be a sub-section of an existing website for his employer, but it needed to have it’s own “style.” So I dived into learning even more code to make his section stand out.

And by this point the word was starting to get out among my friends that I knew how to do this stuff, and so I got a few more requests to work on similar projects.

On one of those projects, I made a discovery. My friends, who worked for a church, were using a tool that presented itself as a platform specifically for “church websites.” If I’m allowed to say this: it sucked. It was really complicated, and not in a “we’ve got lots of cool features” way but in a “this looks like it was designed by a hamster in a maze” kinda way. It looked old (really old) even though it has just been released a couple of years before. There was not much help or support to speak of when they had questions or things didn’t work quite right. And, to top it all off, it was really, really expensive.

I felt awful for these friends of mine. I felt like they were getting ripped off. And since this “platform” they were using was used by a lot of other churches like theirs, I knew that meant a lot of other churches were also getting ripped off. And for the first time it occurred to me that I should really do this not just for a few friends but to help a lot of other people, too. And so I founded my company, Soren, to help nonprofits use technology to do their work better without getting ripped off.

The motivation wasn’t “I’ve got the coolest idea since snapchat.” And it wasn’t “This idea is going to make me richer than Zuckerberg.” And it wasn’t even “I know how to do all this cool stuff and I just want to do it all the time.” No, the motivation was this: I saw that there was a need, that the solutions that existed for addressing that need were bad in every way, and that I might actually be able to do something to fix it.

To really act on that motivation, there were two important lessons that I learned and want to share with you this morning.

First, to be able to do something to fix the need I saw, I did in fact need to know a few things. At this point, I knew a little code, just enough to get by. I knew what I liked in terms of design, but I didn’t really know how to design things that other people might like. And there were a lot of pieces to the complicated puzzle of building and managing websites that I knew I had no idea about. But like I did when I was your age and was fascinated with that mixing board, I started going out and finding everything I could. I started reading every bit of documentation I could find, following tech blogs to stay on top of trends, taking online courses to learn new skills.

And here’s what I learned: there are some basics that you need to do anything. But you don’t need to know everything to put the basics to work.

I mentioned at the beginning that I play the guitar. And there’s this joke that I hear a lot about the guitar: that you can play every pop song ever written with three chords. And it’s kinda true: there are a lot of songs that you can play with those three chords. Now, of course, as any good guitarist will tell you, there’s a lot more than three chords to playing the guitar. There are lots of other things you can learn: how to riff on a scale, how to modify the shape of a chord for different positions on the fretboard, how to fingerpick, how to do hammers and bends. But you don’t need to know those things to play the guitar: you need to know those first three chords. Then you can learn the other things as you go, getting better and better as you hone your mad skills.

Most things are like that: once you have the basics, you have enough to cover a lot of ground. Of course, there are a million other things you can learn beyond the basics in any field. But you shouldn’t try to learn them all up front or you’ll never actually do anything. You should learn them as you are trying to do things and encounter questions: I got this far, and now I don’t know how to do this particular thing that’s new, so now I need to learn some new skills to get past this particular challenge. Then, once you clear that hurdle, keep going until you hit another one, then go study and learn what you need to get around that specific problem. And while you are doing that, and actually getting your hands dirty, you’ll start to realize that there are better ways of doing things and there are worse ways. And then when you read about “the right way” to do something you’ll understand why it’s the right way or it will make a lightbulb go off because some question that you haven’t quite answered yet that’s been buzzing around in your head will suddenly fall into place. And that kind of learning by doing I think is so much more valuable than just consuming tons of information without using it.

The second really important thing I have learned is that to identify a need and be able to tell that the existing solutions don’t work, you need to get to know and listen to people.

In the web design industry there are a lot of “cookie-cutter” solutions that exist. I started learning by working with some of them: just spinning up a WordPress.com blog and choosing one of their pre-designed themes. Three clicks and you’ve got a fully-functioning site. Not bad for a day’s work.

What you learn over time is that everything is designed with a particular audience in mind. When someone made that predesigned theme, they were imagining a restaurant using it to build their website or a bookstore or a photographer. So they designed it to work specifically for that person who is in their imagination. Sometimes that will also work well for other people, but sometimes it’s hard to make it stretch. A restaurant and coffee shop aren’t that different, but a restaurant and an airline are really different. It would be hard to make the same thing work for both of them.

That seems really obvious, but it isn’t always that obvious. It’s really easy to look at something, say “oh that’s nice,” and just try to make it work and waste a lot of time trying to duck-tape together something that can’t be held together.

What I’ve learned is that the better way to do it is to start with the “who”: who are you designing something for? Go talk to them, find out what they do, how they do it, what they struggle with, what obstacles get in their way. Then you can come up with a list of what needs to be in the solution you are designing. And from that, you can build something that actually is for them, and not for someone kinda like them or for someone who has nothing in common with them or just because you think it’s cool.

You all are about to embark on a really great project. It’s a daunting prompt: if my teacher had told me I had to go do something good for the world that aligned with my interests, I would have the ultimate case of writer’s block. It is easy to freeze here and let this moment just happen. But I hope you all seize the chance to do something really great. Take the opportunity to explore something you find fascinating. Go listen to people, learn about their interests and their challenges. Find out how this thing you are fascinated by could make their lives better. Come up with an idea that has a specific person in mind. Then figure out what the equivalent of the three chords are you need to get started on this project and just go for it. It’s going to be challenging, but it’s going to be great. Thanks.