Let’s start with some level setting.

Who am I?

I graduated from Stanford in 2006 and went to work for eBay shortly thereafter. I’m a product manager for Trust & Safety on the world’s largest online marketplace. I’m fascinated by the internet and believe strongly in the reach and capabilities of technology to do good.

My first “real” job was for UCSB creating webpages for the Theoretical Physics department when I was 15, after teaching myself HTML from one of those huge books. I suppose I also did IT support for my middle school a little before that, too. You know the drill.

What is the purpose of this blog?

Good question. Sharing knowledge is important to me, and in the past I’ve been heavily involved with running 3 blogs and several journalistic pursuits (including an academic journal). However, I ended up shutting the 3 blogs down for various reasons. My personal blog was too personal, my Stanford-area food review blog neglected to build a community and was humbled by Yelp, and my student leadership blog was a bit preachy and perhaps too early for Generation Y blogging.

Now that those connections are gone, I miss being able to add to the conversation and publish my thoughts. Hence, this blog is.

What is the goal of this blog?

I hope to write good analysis and opinion posts about technology, cultural trends, Generation Y, and business (including marketing and customer support). My interests are very broad, and include everything from recruiting to neuroscience. We’ll see what pops out.

The big, hairy, audacious goal of this blog is to have enough pull to get new posts up on Techmeme and commented on by el señor Robert Scoble.

I do not expect to make any revenue off this blog.

Last thoughts

In the past, I spent a lot of time learning how to run a good blog: SEO, Problogger, short posts with lists, multiple posts each day, staying in a specific topic area, networking with other bloggers, etc. The trouble with that is it doesn’t always work, and when it does, it is costly particularly in terms of time. Truly successful blogs have numerous writers and serve as aggregation and filtering functions for the masses. That model isn’t what I want to do; it’s outside the scope of this blog.

Instead, I seek to have very high quality thought on this blog mixed with a bunch of random junk (quite literally, like what I ate for lunch), and as such know this blog isn’t a serious effort to make money or build a huge audience. So be it. We’ll see what happens. Let me know what you think!