Don is willing to keep trying new things and to bridge between worlds, this is a partial history.
Organizational Social Networks and Social Due Diligence
You've vetted the management team, audited the books, and interviewed the customers, why does the merger still fail?
Don has been working with the strategy consulting firm, FountainPark in Helsinki from the business side and University of Oulu on the academic to develop ways to gather and analyze network information inside of companies and make recomendations about how to change the organization to make it more productive and more innnovative. He actively analyzies and tests new methods of gathering and utilizing network data help organizations work better.
Financial capital to social capital
A company has a great product, a great team, great backing, but somehow the do not succeed -- what's the missing ingredient? After watching hundereds of pitches and reading hundreds of business plans, Don started to look for the missing element and found it in the idea of social networks.
Don contacted experts in the field created the Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy (ISNAE). As a new, small non profit we did a number of educational events. We ran into the interesting situation where shortly after ISNAE was started, the name used for collaborative software changed from "groupware" to "social networking software." The organization "networked" Don with many entrepreneurs in companies all over the world, as well as his contacts with academia. Many are as excited about the potential affect on individuals, organizations and regions that the research on social networks could provide and because of this Don has given talks and taught all worldwide . Don's article vary from highly academic to accessible because of his belief that the on-line versions of social network are making the years of research on off-line networks much more valuable. Don's has writee articles and papers he has written and at he created and maintains the resources page of the ISNAE Web site.
Academic research, Identity and Control
Mark Granovetter told Don that "for a more neuanced view of networks than most analysts have, read the book Idenity and Control by Harrison Whie. White had been Granovetter's thesis adviser and the leader of the "Harvard Revolution" in sociology that, among other things, used networks and new mathematical techniques to describe society. The book is extremely challenging and the number of people who understood it ws in the 10s, though it is an amazing book with rich information. What started a second project and contributed to the newer edition by writing some parts, giving feedback on the overall book and creating the index.
Entrepreneurship and innovation
Don came to appreciate the role of entrepreneur in society and first working with IAI and later on my own I first helped market and the completely managed educational events for entrepreneurs. Ultimately this involved deciding on the topic, finding the speakers, creating the format and questions for the speakers and moderating the event. Here is information about the Central Coast Angel Network events. In addition, there is the New Santa Cruz Group; which I co founded with Gerald Barnett, the director of Intellectual Property Management at UCSC.
Working with businesses
At InfoPoint was that Don made Web sites for many types of businesses. Part of the process was getting to know the businesses: their goals and customers. The surprise was, the businesses often did not know this themselves; so he turned into business consultant. Don volunteered at International Angel Investors and sponsored a Web site for them. He started spending time with business consultants, finance people, angels, VCs and countless entrepreneurs. He heard hundreds of pitches, read hundred of business plans and participated in discussions about them with people who had had real experience. He started coaching and mentoring business because he had heard it all and made many useful contacts. Self-taught at many things, Don studied finance, accounting and business law during this time.
The Internet
Don registered his own name, steiny.com, in 1992. In those days it did not even cost anything, but they checked to make sure you were really using it (this was before the Web, so that meant for mail). In early 1994 he registered the domain name "shoppingmall.com" and because of that his friend, Marcelo Siero, registered "loans.com," "postoffice.com," "houses.com," "artists.com" and some others. The domain names have proved to be worth millions.
Don was so excited by the Internet and convinced of its future, He started a company, InfoPoint, with a couple of investors and tried to create a company that would aggregate local advertising. Don learned the experiences of budgeting, hiring (and terminating) employees, managing investors and all the practical things that go with running a company.
Teaching about Unix
The best way to really learn something is to teach it, so Don spent several years improving his communication skills and learning Unix in complete detail. He taugh
everyone from first time users to operating system internals. His clients included HP, where he developed and taught a course on HP-UX Internals for HP and it's partners in the US and Japan; Motorla where he developed SVR4 Internals class that I taught in a number of places, including Motorola University in Tempe. Don sat on his living room floor with the source code for SVR4 and traced through the entire operating system and developed the course. He taught varients of it in a number of places, including a Bell Labs site.
C/Unix Consulting and Training
For about 1 year after leaving school, Don continued to work on the parser. It was a huge job and the energy of both me and the people who were paying for it started to dwindle. I put an ad in the San Jose Mercury News "C/Unix consulting and training." I got three calls the next day. This lead to more than 10 years of contract programming. During that time I developed one commercial software package, which I sold; a program called vuser that was used to do much of the functional validation and reliability testing on many types of HP systems for over 10 year; and many arcane things that you can find if you drill down.
Natural Language Parser
At UCSC Don started using e-mail a little in 1978. By 1979 he was using the computer to write papers and was teaching himself the C programming language. In 1979 he met former UCSC linguistics professor, John Grinder, who hired him to gather some data for a natural language parser being developed by a consultant at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The consultant, Jan Russak, taught him C and they worked together on this project using telnet, ftp and e-mail: in 1979.
UCSC Linguistics - 1981
UCSC undergraduate linguistics is often considered to be the best undergraduate linguistics program in the world. It also considered the most difficult and demanding major at UCSC with students told to expect 80 hour of homework per week in one of the classes. It has a broad base, with phonology, morphology, historical linguistics, anthropology of language, field methods, 2 quarters of phonetics, 2 quarters of syntax and more.
Computer Literacy for Humanities Majors
In 1980 Don got a grant and developed a class "Computer Literacy for Humanities Majors." The course was originally taught in the UCSC Linguistics Department, but then moved to Stevenson College core courses and is still being taught (though it is completely different).
