“Time moves in one direction, memory in another,” said William Gibson. I was reminded of these words when reading two long pieces about my friends Mathew Ingram and Wesley Verhoeve. 

Both stories (tangentially involved me,” and inadvertently took me down memory lane. Mathew wrote about the first Mesh conference, where he invited me as a keynote speaker. When I returned from the conference, I quit my day job at Business 2.0 and started working full-time on GigaOm. The year was 2006; since then, life has been a journey. Mathew later became a writer and confidante at GigaOm, and some of the folks I met at the conference have become lifelong friends. Like many events at that time, Mesh captured a vibe and a feeling of optimism about what was to come. Mathew’s piece reminded me of one truism: “life is a contact sport.” Going-out, mingling, and learning are how you grow. 

Wesley is now a professional photographer, but a long time ago, he worked in the music industry. He started taking photographs late in life and has been doing so for ten years. My Photos.app archive shows the first time I met Wesley was 12 years ago, when I went out to have a coffee with him and dragged along Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of Foursquare. In 2015, I published an interview with New York Times writer Jenna Wortham, and Wesley took her portraits for the profile. At that time, he was chronicling the stories of creatives who moved (Read more...)