George Rebane
Today RR has belatedly established a link to the Ooga Labs Blog that is the online voice and vision of James Currier. To you people of my generation, James is an exemplar and phenom of the young 21st century. He is a recognized and successful dotcom entrepreneur popped from one of the east coast’s elite leadership mills. The man is educated, smart, brilliantly instinctive, a deep thinker, loving husband and caring father, … well, at this point it gets a little overdone no matter how true it is. Let me just say that he’s also good looking and has a great singing voice. Oh, and did I mention that his educational pedigree lists degrees from Exeter, Princeton, and Harvard. His ideas are not to be trifled with, and if you do decide to debate him, don’t show up at the gunfight with your pocket knife.
James and I first met in the early nineties when I was consultant to a major telecom company and he walked in the door as an intern on a six-month rotation program. Our first couple of hours together were a bit rocky, but before the sun set that day we both saw some promise in each other and embarked on what has turned out to be a fantastic friendship (even though the kid is younger than my own kids).
After some international adventures and corporate homework, James started a company back in cold, cloudy, clammy Cambridge that he named emode.com. Its website offered people a chance to discover themselves and then share/compare their discoveries with friends and other people. When James described this new concept of using the internet to me and Jo Ann, we didn’t know what to make of it. The basic idea was that people always liked to look at themselves in a mirror, no matter whether that mirror reflected and revealed their outer visage or inner workings. It also didn’t matter that we didn’t fully understand this brave new world - it did matter that we understood James. We put a little money in James’ new company, not so much as to make a profit, but to show James that our hearts were in his dream. Big mistake.
Forget about the hearts and dreams, we should have known the kid was going to make good and bet the farm. He soon moved ‘team emode’ to San Francisco, got married to a fantastic lady (more Camelot), worked his butt off, renamed the company tickle.com, and then sold the whole thing to Monster.com for big bucks. Oh well.
Not yet forty, James had no thought of kicking back and starting to clip coupons. True to the call of the wild that typifies the dotcom clan of those having managed the Exhilarating Exit, he started Ooga Labs as a new kind of nursery for turning ideas into innovative internet businesses. I invite you to visit Ooga Labs and try to figure out what kinds of new stuff will be coming out of all those fevered and feverish young brains he has working day and night – it will be nothing short of the future itself. In the interval James finds time to write some pithy thoughts about Man, nature, society, and the cosmos. My plan is to goad him into producing and posting more of such pithy stuff on his blog – poke in there now and then to see what he’s up to.
And, oh yes, did I mention that James is also an experienced trans-ocean sailor.
Too bad public schools can't be more like Exeter.
Maybe if they got the money and the students Exeter gets, they might be.
In the meantime, if the taxpayers provide for a Kia, why are they screaming about the Mercedes they are not getting?
Posted by: Douglas Keachie | 08 March 2008 at 12:51 AM