Who are you?
Stephen King. Perhaps you’ve heard of me … I’m the guy that shows up on organic ranking ~#10,875,473 if you Google my name.
Naw, I’m not THE Stephen King. I’m one of the many Stephen King’s. I’m a high-tech marketing and sales guy that has a good product management and business development background. Beyond being a 4 month veteran blogger for Techvibes in Calgary, I’m also looking for my next career. This blog more or less follows the meetings that I’ve been doing in Calgary as I re-engage in the high-tech scene in Calgary. Here’s a one-page marketing and sales leadership consulting flyer that I use for a quick bio.
What’s your background?
The short answer is that I’ve been in 5 different software companies in my 25+ year career so far. Four of them were with the tax and accounting industry in Canada. Two were from small start-up entrepreneurial companies (Cantax and Greenpoint, the latter I co-founded) and two were large international firms (Softkey / The Learning Company, Intuit). With Intuit, I played a number of executive roles, and was also one of the 230 or so top leaders out of the 8,000 person workforce for Intuit Inc., based in Mountainview, California.
If you’re interested, there’s more detail on LinkedIn… feel free to “Add me as a friend”.
Why are you writing for Techvibes?
I love putting my thoughts somewhere… with my music, but apart from a few friends and family, I wasn’t getting much traffic. A friend sent me an Alberta Startup Index story in Techvibes and I wondered who was covering the Calgary area… Rob Lewis (Editor), said “No one … do you want to do it?” I said, “Yah.”
As it turns out, it’s also had a good career impact on my networking here in Calgary so I’ll continue doing it from that perspective, too.
Not too mention, I’ve had more than my share of free coffee’s and lunch’s, too … thanks for your generosity, everyone! 
Why should I care what you have to say?
Don’t be so mean.
My Daddy always told me that in order to be interestING you’ve got to be interestED … so since I’m interested in so many things on this wonderous planet of ours, that maybe some of it’s interesting to others. My friends tell me that I synthesize information pretty quickly ’cause I have a wide range of high-tech experience from product management, coding, call centres, documentation, technical and copy writing, directing HR and Legal, and, of course, marketing, sales and communication … I hope that I can help shed some light on some stuff.
Anything you need to disclose?
Here’s a few more websites that I’m involved with:
1) My music site (and a chance to order from my 6 CDs through iTunes and the like) and social links like LinkedIn, MySpace, Second Life, etc…
2) A software start-up I’m working on: Customer Loyalty in partnership with www.businessoverbroadway, both based in Seattle.
3) According to CBC, 15% of Canadians would rather vote for the President than the Prime Minister. With some U.S. friends, we expanded on this concept and created www.worldvotesforthepresident.com. Please VOTE and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE pass on the URL to your friends. I’m as interested in the results as I am in the viral nature of the site, especially if it can go really far internationally.
4) I’ve started working on a book … you read it here first. Based on the general feeling that all marketers are liars (which is probably why organic links in Google are 6 times more likely to get clicked on than paid Adword links). Thusly, marketers must create lasting sales relationships with customers vs. hollow marketing campaigns re: “New and Improved.” The book is about what I know about it. (please let me know what you think of the concept!)
What do you do in your spare time?
For starters, I blog for Techvibes. “Spare time” is an odd phrase, because I never seem to have any time to spare! Besides the aforementioned music and various web meanderings, I’ve got a great family, I do outdoors Calgary stuff (like snowshoeing, snowboarding, camping), have run in triathlons and marathons, meet a lot of great people, and have 3 cats, 3 degus, 9 or so fish, and an awesome dog (I get a lot of business ideas when I walk her on Nosehill in Calgary). Life is good!
Time for a steaming cup of joe.
