Before email marketing, before marketing technology, before 25 years of building things for brands and agencies — there was a robot.
Not a real one. A programming exercise.
I was in my early twenties, sitting in front of a computer, working through a basic programming lesson. The task was simple: write a short program that made a little robot character move across the screen.
I don't remember the exact language. I don't remember the exact steps. What I do remember is the moment it worked.
The robot moved.
And I thought — I did that. I told it what to do, and it did it.
That was it. That was the moment. Not a dramatic career pivot, not a formal decision to go into technology. Just a small, quiet realization that I could make something happen with code.
Looking back, that moment planted something. A curiosity. A willingness to figure things out. A comfort with not knowing how something worked yet — because I'd already learned that I could figure it out if I tried.
That's the thread that runs through everything that came after.