Saturn

The Garage

In the 1980s, in a quiet neighborhood in the Pacific Northwest, my father parked the car outside in the driveway because the inside of the garage was no longer about cars.

The inside of the garage was about a telescope.

My father had built it. Not assembled — built. He had ground the mirror himself. He had fabricated the tube. He had calibrated and recalibrated the focal length over the course of months until it produced the kind of image he believed it was capable of producing.

The telescope my father built in our garage was not a tabletop instrument. It was not the kind of thing you fold up and put away. It was a Newtonian reflector with a tube the size of a giant toilet paper roll, mounted on a stand he had also built, and the eyepiece sat at the top of the tube roughly twelve feet off the floor. To look through it, you climbed a twelve-foot ladder. He had built the ladder, too, or he had picked it for the job — either way, the ladder was as much a part of the rig as the optics were. The whole thing took up most of the garage. We could not have parked a car in there if we had wanted to, and we did not want to. The car could sleep in the driveway. The telescope was the priority. The telescope, in fact, was a small permanent resident of our family that you had to climb to greet.

I was eight or nine the first time he took me out at night to look through it.

He held the ladder steady while I climbed. Twelve feet of metal rungs, in the dark, in our garage, with my father below me telling me to take my time. He kept saying things like just give it a minute, your eyes have to adjust, and it will be sharper than you think it will be. I remember being a little nervous, because eight-year-olds can be nervous on twelve-foot ladders even when their fathers are holding the bottom. I remember the cold of the eyepiece against my eye. I remember the brass smelling metallic in a way I had not smelled before. I remember thinking the telescope was as tall as a tree.

And then I saw Saturn.

Not a smudge. Not a fuzz. Saturn. The actual planet. The actual rings. From our actual house in our actual neighborhood, with my eye pressed to an eyepiece twelve feet off the floor of our garage. The rings tipped at exactly the angle they are tipped in textbooks, but they were not in a textbook. They were right in front of me. I could see the gap between the inner ring and the outer ring. I could see the disk of the planet itself, a pale yellow color that was not dramatic and was therefore even more startling. There was a real thing out there, and a man in our family had built a thing in our garage that could see it. And he had built a ladder so I could see it too.

I was eight or nine. I did not have the language yet for what was happening to me.

What I understood was this: my father was a person who took things that other people thought were impossible and made them possible by being patient and skilled and refusing to quit. The rings of Saturn were an example. The telescope was an example. The fact that an ordinary suburban garage in our neighborhood now contained a working observatory was an example.

That moment shaped me more than any book I have ever read. It is the reason I do what I do now. Twenty years from now, when my grandson asks me why his grandmother spent her career chasing technologies most people did not understand yet, I will tell him about the rings of Saturn. I will tell him about the night I found out, in my bones, that the limits of the world are not where most people think they are. They are wherever a serious person is willing to put them.

My father was a serious person.

And the garage was not the only room in our house that had been quietly converted into a working studio.

There was the dark room. He processed his own photographs. Black-and-white film. The chemistry baths. The red safelight. The quiet, patient ritual of pulling an image up out of a piece of paper while the timer ticked on the shelf. I learned the smell of fixer before I learned the smell of most things a child learns the smell of. He shot the photographs. He developed them. He printed them. He hung them on the line to dry. The whole pipeline lived in our house, in a room he had built out for the purpose, because at no point in his life did Kevin Bagley ever say to himself, “I would like to do this thing, but I will let somebody else do most of it for me.”

He did the whole thing or he did not do it.

And there was the office.

My father’s office was the room in our house that, in retrospect, was the most him. There were monitors. Plural. There were cables running along the floor and up the walls, in volumes that did not match what the rest of the world considered normal in the 1980s. There was usually code on at least one screen, frozen mid-thought, waiting for him to come back. There was light from the screens that did not match the light from the rest of the house. If you walked in unannounced — which I did, often — the room would be dim and the only thing illuminated would be his face, lit blue from the side.

Years later, in 1999, when a film called The Matrix opened in theaters, I sat in the audience and watched the green code rain down the screens of Morpheus’s ship and I thought, in real time, “Oh. That is my father’s office.”

My father’s office resembled the Matrix before the Matrix existed.

He had been living inside that visual aesthetic, in a back room of our suburban house, for almost two decades before pop culture developed the iconography to describe it. He did not know he was ahead of anything. He just liked having his code in front of him, on as many screens as possible, in a room dark enough that the screens were the brightest objects in it. He thought that was how you did the work. It was.

Three rooms. The dark room with the safelight. The garage with the twelve-foot telescope. The office with the cascading code. Three working studios in one suburban house, each one expressing a different facet of the same man.

Most fathers in our neighborhood had a den. My father had three working rooms and a workshop ethic that did not stop when he came home from his actual job.

Which brings me to the actual job.

The Work

His name was Kevin Michael Bagley.

He was born February 28, 1954, in a country that had not yet built ARPANET, did not yet have a personal computer, did not yet have an integrated circuit you could buy off a shelf. By the time he was working professionally, all of those things had arrived, and he was doing some of the work that put them to use.

He was a developer at a company called Maverick Microsystems. His most consequential contribution was the work he did on the Maverick International MICR encoder system — the machine, and the software that drove it, that made magnetic ink character recognition reliable enough to be deployed across American banking.

If you do not know what I just said, here is the short version: every check you have ever written has a row of strange-looking numbers along the bottom edge. Those numbers are printed in a special magnetic ink and a special font, and they encode the routing number, the account number, and the check number in a way that machines can read at high speed. Banks use them to clear checks. The Federal Reserve uses them to clear checks between banks. The entire automated check-processing system that ran the American economy for decades was built on top of MICR.

My father wrote code for the encoder.

Translation: he was one of the engineers who taught machines to read.

You will not find his name in the popular history of artificial intelligence. Most engineers who did this kind of work in the 1980s do not appear in popular histories of anything. What he was working on was technical, unglamorous, and absolutely foundational. Pattern recognition. Optical character recognition. Magnetic character recognition. Machine vision. The actual building blocks of every system you now interact with that “sees” something — your phone reading a deposit check, your car reading a road sign, an MRI machine flagging an anomaly, a security camera identifying a face — all of it sits on top of work done by engineers like my father, in companies whose names most people never learned.

The MICR encoder system Maverick International deployed was used in banks across the country. Maverick gave my father a plaque acknowledging his contribution. He kept it on a shelf in our home for years.

It was lost in a move from Bothell, sometime in the late 1990s. Boxes get mislabeled. Things get given away. The family moved on. But I have been quietly heartbroken about it ever since. Not because the plaque was the proof of him — he did not need a plaque to prove who he was — but because the plaque was the kind of small physical object that lets a granddaughter, decades later, hold a thing in her hand and say, this. This was him.

I want Dallas to be able to do that. Some of what we are building right now — at CI Web Group, at OnePath.AI, at JustStartAI — is, when I am honest with myself, an attempt to build him something he can hold. The plaque is gone. The work has to be the replacement.

There is a line that runs from the MICR encoder in 1985 to the smart website my company shipped in 2025. The line is not metaphorical. It is the same line. It is teaching machines to read. It is teaching machines to understand. It is teaching machines to be useful in service of human work.

My father started at one end of that line.

I am, with the people I am lucky enough to build alongside, working at the other end.

The Games

The other thing my father built — and the thing he is most likely to be remembered for, if he is remembered at all in the rooms where these things matter — was, it turns out, not a video game.

It was nine of them. That I can verify. There may be more.

I knew about Mabel’s Mansion my whole life. That one was the family showpiece. It was on the shelf. It was the thing I would point to when people asked what my father did at night. “Mabel’s Mansion. He wrote a video game. On a forty-eight-kilobyte computer. In 1984. End of biography.”

What I did not fully appreciate until much later — until I started gathering material for this book and asked my mother to help me find what was left, and the rest of the record came back to me through retro gaming archivists who collect this stuff and have preserved it for the public good — was that Mabel’s Mansion was not the start of his career as a software publisher. It was nearly the end of it.

He had been shipping commercial software for at least four years before Mabel’s came out, on a track that was visible to anyone who cared to look. The reason it took me so long to see the whole shape of it is that he never sat me down and walked me through it. He was the one who built the work. He left it to other people to keep score.

In 1979, computers and astronomy and games called him, and he answered.

The earliest one I have on hand is from 1980. It is called The Star Gazer’s Guide, and it is a piece of astronomy software for the Apple II, published by Synergistic Software out of Bellevue, Washington. The published manual reads, in plain print:

PROGRAMS by Kevin Bagley

With Revisions by Robert C. Clardy

Copyright (C) 1980 by Synergistic Software

The man who built a telescope in our garage to show his eight-year-old daughter the rings of Saturn was also, simultaneously, writing the astronomy software that put star maps on the screens of other people’s Apple IIs. The garage, the telescope, the Saturn moment in my childhood — and the commercial software that helped strangers find what he had taught me to find — those were the same man, doing the same work, in two different mediums.

I did not know this when I was eight. I am not sure my father even thought about it that way. He was working on what was in front of him. The garage telescope and The Star Gazer’s Guide were not, to him, a metaphor. They were a Tuesday.

But for me, sitting here forty-six years later, it is the thing that finally pulled the whole picture together. He was an early commercial astronomy programmer on personal computers in the United States. He was writing the software that helped a generation of curious people find Saturn for themselves — because he had already built the device, in his own garage, that helped his daughter find it.

That is what kind of person he was. That is the kind of work he chose.

After Star Gazer, he kept shipping. I will name them in the order they came out, because the cumulative record matters more than any one of them does on its own.

Across the next three years he shipped six more titles, working at a rate of roughly one per quarter while holding down a full-time engineering job. In 1981, two more for Synergistic Software — The Planetary Guide, an educational program co-written with David Kampschafer that picked up where Star Gazer left off, and Escape from Arcturus, a science-fiction arcade-action game built around an interstellar defense story — and a third for Computer Programs Unlimited out of Everett, Washington: The Human Fly, a climbing game in which the player scales a twenty-floor building called the C.P.U. Towers while dodging angry police, falling flower pots, menacing gorillas, and an occasional rising balloon. The cover art has a giant gorilla on it, in the spirit of Donkey Kong. My father did not write modest games. He wrote games that committed.

In 1982 he shipped three titles across three different publishers in three different genres: Oil Rig, a business simulation through Computer Programs Unlimited in which the player runs a fictional oil drilling operation, manages cash flow, pays penalties for “improper business conduct,” and aims for a final score of “gusher” at the pro level (he was running customer rebate offers for high-scoring players in the early 1980s, from a closet in our house in Bothell); Flockland Island Crisis, a shoot-’em-up through Vital Information, Inc., named, almost certainly, after the Falklands War that had broken out that spring — he was the kind of person who would name a video game after a current geopolitical event and assume the player would catch the reference; and Vortex, an action game through Datamost in Chatsworth, California, two years before Mabel’s Mansion would put him on Datamost’s shelves at scale. The Vortex relationship was the groundwork.

Three games in 1982. Three different publishers. Three different genres. He was twenty-eight years old and shipping commercial software at the rate of one title per quarter while holding down a full-time engineering job.

And then, in 1984, Mabel’s Mansion was published by Datamost. By then he had four years of commercial software credits, seven prior published titles, and a working understanding of four different software publishers’ contracts. Mabel’s was the biggest. The most famous. The one that made it onto the most shelves and into the most archives. It was the closest he ever got to mainstream visibility. But it was not, as my family has sometimes told the story over the years, his first or his only one. It was his eighth published title, in his fifth genre. And it was not his last.

Mabel’s Mansion was a ninety-room game in 48 kilobytes of memory. The premise was perfect 1980s arcade-adventure: a young man named Barney the Bellhop discovers his aunt Mabel has died and left him her considerable fortune — but Mabel, who was apparently not that fond of Barney, hid her treasure throughout her ninety-room mansion, set traps and puzzles for him to solve, and summoned monsters from the netherworld to guard the place. Mabel’s ghost herself protects the largest cache. Barney has to push furniture, find hidden keys, defeat the monsters with weapons hanging on the walls, and — eventually — get past Mabel.

My father wrote all of it. The mechanics. The art. The puzzles. The monsters. The ghost. Ninety rooms of working game logic, in a memory footprint smaller than a single modern email.

And then, alongside Mabel’s in 1984, he shipped one more title — his ninth, by my count — through a fifth publisher. Howard W. Sams & Co., a Chicago-area technical-book publisher better known for their assembly language manuals than their arcade games, published Ape Escape: a hundred-and-fifty-floor office tower climbing game starring Harry the Ape, who has to dodge closed windows, falling bowling balls, earthquakes, helicopters dropping nets, a zookeeper on a scaffold, and an occasional rising balloon.

Ape Escape was, in essence, The Human Fly cranked up to eleven. Where Human Fly had twenty floors and gorillas trying to drop flower pots on the player, Ape Escape had a hundred and fifty floors and a zookeeper trying to net the ape. He came back to the building-climbing genre three years later and rebuilt it bigger, harder, longer, more elaborate. He could not let the form go. The medium had something more in it that he wanted to find.

Ape Escape would turn out to be his last published commercial title. He had been at it since 1980. He shipped his last game in 1984. By the late 1980s he had taken a programming job at Maverick Microsystems — the same company we have been talking about — and the gaming chapter of his life closed. He did not write another commercial software title for the rest of his career.

So here is the actual record.

Nine published software titles in five years — 1980, 1981, 1981, 1981, 1982, 1982, 1982, 1984, 1984 — across five different software publishers, in at least five different genres. Educational astronomy software for Synergistic Software in Bellevue. Action and arcade titles for C.P.U. Software in Everett. A shoot-’em-up for Vital Information. Two action and adventure titles for Datamost in California. A book-and-disk arcade title for Howard W. Sams & Co. in Chicago. All of it shipped while he was holding down a full-time engineering job at Maverick Microsystems building the MICR encoder system that processed checks for the American banking system.

Forty-eight kilobytes of memory. No internet. No Stack Overflow. No YouTube tutorial. No AI assistant. No co-founder in the garage. Just him, the Apple II, the coffee, and the patience.

He shipped nine games.

That is the part that still stops me.

He shipped nine games.

The vast majority of people who told themselves they were going to build something in their garage in the early 1980s did not ship anything at all. The people who shipped were the people who did not stop. My father did not stop. He may have been the only person in our entire neighborhood who was building anything at all in those years that resembled commercial software. He certainly did not have peers down the street he could text. There was no texting. He had himself, his Apple II, his coffee cup, and the patience to keep going.

When I am tired, which is more often than I admit, I remind myself that my father shipped nine commercial software titles in five years, on a 48K machine, while holding down a full-time engineering job at a company that was building machines that read checks for the American banking system. It was not because he had more time than I do. He had less. He had no AI assistants and no co-founders in his garage and no support structure of any kind beyond my mother, who believed in him, and a daughter who, half the time, was just trying to get him to come inside and eat dinner before it got cold.

He shipped because he could not stand the alternative.

You can still play Mabel’s Mansion today. The Internet Archive has preserved it, alongside the great Apple II games of its era — Maniac Mansion, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, Marble Madness, the whole canon. Anyone with an emulator can boot it up and watch Barney the Bellhop wander through the ninety rooms my father built forty years ago. The other titles are there, too. The Star Gazer’s Guide. The Planetary Guide. Escape from Arcturus. The Human Fly. Flockland Island Crisis. Oil Rig. Vortex. Ape Escape. The full record. Some of them have been cracked, preserved, and uploaded by the patient work of retro-gaming archivists who care deeply about this era of personal computing and have made it their mission to keep the early Apple II software canon alive. I owe them more than I will ever be able to repay. Without their work, I would not have the names of half of these titles. Without their work, my father’s commercial output would already be slipping out of the historical record. They saved it. They saved him.

I have not played the games myself. I am not sure I am ready to. But I know they are there. I know my father’s work has outlived him by decades and will outlive me by decades more.

I have inherited that. Whatever I am, I am that.

Bill Gates

There is a story in our family I have heard a hundred times.

A version of it goes like this. Sometime in 1981 or 1982, my father drove across Lake Washington on the 520 bridge, parked at a warehouse in Bellevue, and walked in to meet two men who would become, within ten years, the two most famous founders in the history of personal computing.

Their names were Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

By the time my father met them, Microsoft had only recently moved out of its Albuquerque garage. The company had relocated to Bellevue, Washington in January of 1979. They were no longer two guys in a basement — but they were not yet a campus, not yet an empire, not yet the most valuable software company in the United States. They were two founders in their twenties, working out of a warehouse under the 520 bridge, trying to figure out what their company was going to be.

They had heard about my father.

By 1981, he was a published Apple II software author with at least four shipping titles across three publishers. He was on the radar of the small Pacific Northwest software ecosystem. Microsoft was thinking about getting into games. They invited him in.

I want to lock the historical detail with my mother’s direct words, because she is the family historian on the events of those years and she lived alongside my father for the entire arc of his Microsoft interaction. When I asked her about the specific mechanics of the invitation — had Gates written him a letter, had it been a phone call, had they sent someone — she answered me directly. There was no letter. He met them in person. The meeting was at Gates’s new office under the 520 bridge in Bellevue, right after Gates and Allen moved out of their garage. Those are her exact words. The version I am giving you in this section is the version she has verified.

Gates and Allen sat with him for hours.

The project they were most excited about, my mother told me when I asked her about that day for this book, was “that aircraft landing thing” — she could not remember the name. I went and looked it up. Microsoft had, in 1981, just begun licensing a flight simulator from a small Illinois company called Sublogic. Microsoft Flight Simulator was released in November of 1982 and would go on to become the second-oldest video game franchise still in active development at the time of this writing. So that is what they were showing him in the warehouse: an early version of what would eventually become the longest-running game in their company’s history.

They wanted him to come work for them. They offered him a job.

But their pitch had a philosophical core. They wanted to build games for the home, for kids, for the dawn of the personal computer. And, they told him, their guiding principle was no violence. They were going to draw a clean line. They wanted Microsoft to be a publisher of non-violent computer games.

My father turned them down.

He thought they were crazy.

The games he was making in 1981 and 1982 had angry police, falling flower pots, menacing gorillas, attacking black birds, oil-rig disasters, foreign land grabbers, monsters, and ghosts. He was not in the no-violence business. He was in the make-the-game-as-vivid-and-as-mechanically-interesting-as-possible business. He told Gates and Allen as politely as a man like my father could that the no-violence-in-games idea was not going to work commercially, that he had his own work to do, and that he had to get back to it.

He drove home over the 520 bridge. He never went back.

About ten years later, my mother slugged him in the shoulder.

They were sitting at the kitchen table — my mother does most of her best work at kitchen tables — and the subject of Microsoft came up. By then Gates and Allen were billionaires. By then their two-person warehouse company under the 520 bridge had become the largest software company in the world.

She slugged him in the shoulder and said, “What the hell were you thinking. You should have taken that job.”

She told me, when I asked her about it forty years later, that she will never forget his face.

She also told me, with the kind of unsentimental clarity my mother has carried her entire life, “Our lives would have been significantly different.”

I want to be careful here.

I am not in the business of regretting decisions my parents made. They made the choices they made. I would not be who I am if my father had taken that job and we had spent the next decade and a half inside the Redmond ecosystem. I would not be an engineer, developer, and inventor’s daughter who runs a digital marketing agency. I would not be writing this book. My grandson would not exist. The line my father, my son, my grandson, and I make was set the day he walked out of that warehouse, and I am the line.

But there is something worth saying about the fact that my father turned them down.

He did not turn them down because he did not see what they were building. He turned them down because he saw it perfectly clearly and disagreed with it. He had a thesis about games — what they were, what they were for, why people played them — and his thesis did not match theirs. He did not believe their no-violence direction was going to work commercially. He may, in the long run, have been right and wrong at the same time: Microsoft did not become the world’s biggest publisher of non-violent computer games. They became the world’s biggest publisher of operating systems. The thing they were the most excited about in that warehouse — Flight Simulator — was, ironically, a non-violent game. The thing they ended up being known for had nothing to do with games at all.

My father saw what was happening in that room, formed his own view of it, and acted on his own view of it. He was not afraid. He was not ignorant. He was not too small. He was confident enough in his own judgment that he was willing to walk away from Bill Gates and Paul Allen, in a warehouse under the 520 bridge in Bellevue, with both founders of Microsoft in the room, asking him to come work for them.

That is also part of what I inherited.

When the AI moment arrived in our agency in 2023 — when the entire trades industry was telling us we were too early, when our peers in the marketing world were laughing at us, when the safe play was to keep doing what we had been doing for twenty years — I had this story to draw on. I had a father who walked out of a warehouse on Bill Gates and Paul Allen and never apologized for it. He could not have known he was preparing me for the day I would have to bet everything on a technology my entire industry was telling me was a fad. But that is what he was doing.

That is the use of the Bill Gates story. Not as proof of a missed opportunity. As proof that you are allowed to walk out of the warehouse. You are allowed to disagree with the smartest people in the room. You are allowed to have your own thesis and stick to it, even when the room is asking you politely, and offering you a salary, to drop yours and adopt theirs.

My father proved it once, in 1981 or 1982, in Bellevue.

I have tried to prove it ever since.

Hands Up

There is a picture of my father and my son Torel on a roller coaster.

I have looked at it more times than I can count. It is one of the most-used pictures in my entire life — not because of the framing, not because of the lighting, but because of what it teaches.

In the picture, the coaster is mid-drop. My father’s hands are up. He is grinning. He has done this a thousand times — every coaster in every park we ever visited as a family — and you can see, even in a single still frame, that he is in his element. The wind is in his hair. He is mid-fall, mid-laugh, with no grip on the bar at all.

My son is the one gripping the bar.

Torel is small in this picture. His eyes are huge. His mouth is open in something that is not quite a smile and not quite a scream — and if I am honest with myself about what I am looking at, the picture shows a boy who is mostly terrified.

He had not yet learned what his grandfather had spent his whole life teaching him.

That is what makes the picture worth what it is worth to me. It is not a picture of two people doing the thing. It is a picture of a grandfather demonstrating, and a grandson watching, and a coaster doing what coasters do.

That picture is the picture I use whenever I am asked to explain how I think about entrepreneurship, or technology adoption, or the speed of change. When somebody asks me how to handle the AI moment, or the agent moment, or whatever moment is breaking on us next — that picture is the answer.

Hands up. Smile the whole ride.

That is what my father taught me about life.

He taught me by example, on hundreds of family vacations to amusement parks that other dads probably hated. He taught me by getting on every coaster in the park, no matter how tall, no matter how steep, no matter what the line looked like. He taught me by refusing to be afraid of things designed to be scary. And then, when I had children, he taught my son the same way.

It took Torel longer than it took me.

The picture catches him at the part of the lesson where you are still figuring it out — small, gripping the bar, eyes wide, no idea yet that the only choice he had was to enjoy the ride that was about to happen to him whether he braced for it or not. But he got there. He has been on rides since that picture where his hands were the ones up. His grandfather would have looked over at him on those later rides, on those later coasters, and grinned at him, and recognized himself. He learned the lesson his grandfather had been teaching him for as long as he had been old enough to ride. He grew into it.

The inheritance worked.

Most people, when they are about to drop a hundred and fifty feet at sixty miles an hour, hold on. They grip the bar. They close their eyes. They tense every muscle in their body. They make themselves small. The ride happens to them.

My father did not do that.

My father had figured out, long before he ever taught it to me, that the ride was happening either way. The coaster was going to drop. The corkscrew was going to corkscrew. The terror was going to come. The only choice you actually had was what your hands were doing, and what your face was doing, and whether you let yourself believe — for the duration of the ride — that you were the one in charge of the experience.

Hands up was a metaphor he lived.

It was also, in the most literal possible sense, exactly how he ran his career. He did not grip the bar at Maverick Microsystems. He did not grip the bar when Bill Gates and Paul Allen sat across from him in a warehouse in Bellevue. He did not grip the bar when he was deciding to build a video game in his garage on 48 kilobytes of memory while everyone else was watching television. He did not grip the bar when he and my mother decided, sometime in their later years, that they were going to live on a three-story paddlewheeler docked on Lake Union in Seattle. They named the boat The KevLin — his name and hers, fused into a single five-letter word, the marriage compressed into the name on the hull. Forty-seven years of being together and the boat is the kind of detail that captures it: not his boat, not her boat, theirs.

Hands up. Smile the whole ride.

There is, however, a rougher version of that line that has been running through the trades industry for twenty years now, and I owe my father credit for it because he is the one who said it to me first.

When I told him, in the late 1990s, that I was going to leave corporate and become an entrepreneur, he did not give me a speech. He did not warn me about the financial risk. He did not tell me to have a backup plan. He looked at me and said, in the voice of a man who had been doing this his whole life: “It is going to suck.” Then, with the same calm, he added: “Suck it with a smile.”

That was the whole conversation.

Suck it with a smile.

I have been telling that line to contractors from stages for twenty years.

The first time I said it on a stage was at a Daikin event in Canada. Nathalie and her husband Chris, of Brooks Heating and Air, were sitting in the front row. I do not remember the year. I do remember the moment. I delivered the line the way my father had delivered it to me — as advice, calmly, in the voice of a person who had been doing this their whole life — and the room reacted the way a contractor convention hall reacts when something true and slightly profane gets said from the stage. The line did not stay in the keynote room. It walked out into the hallway, where it has been running, in increasingly elaborate variations, ever since.

If you ever ask Nathalie about that event — and contractors in the trades industry have, more times than I can count, asked Nathalie about that event — she will still crack up. Two decades later. Same laugh. Her whole company has been saying *suck it with a smile* to each other since.

My father did not know, when he said the line to me at a kitchen table in the late 1990s, that he was going to be quoted on stages and in hallways across the home services industry for the next twenty years. He would have approved. He would have laughed. He would have insisted on royalties.

The phrase carries the same weight as *hands up, smile the whole ride*. It is the same wisdom, in a different register. The roller-coaster version is the one I tell my grandson. The contractor version is the one I tell the room. They are the same piece of advice. Both of them came from the same man.

Both of them are how he taught me to live.

When I look at how I have run CI Web Group for the last twenty years — exiting PPC and social media when nobody was telling me to, betting on AI before the word was a slogan, right-sizing my entire agency from 320 people to the 38 running it with me today, shipping autonomous agents into the trades while most of my industry was still trying to make sense of ChatGPT — every one of those decisions is a hands-up decision. Every one of them looked, from the outside, like a roller coaster I had no business getting on. Every one of them, from the inside, was the only ride I was actually interested in.

This book is, on one level, a meditation on hands-up living.

The technology revolution arriving right now — the AI revolution, the agent revolution, the AGI horizon, the singularity question, the quantum question, the robotics question, all of it — is the steepest, fastest, scariest coaster human beings have ever been strapped onto.

The people I know who are doing well on this ride are the ones who got their hands up early.

The people I know who are not doing well are still gripping the bar.

The people I know who are doing well on this ride are the ones who got their hands up early.

I am writing this book partly to extend my hand back through the car and pull yours off the bar. I am not promising you the ride will not be scary. It will be. That is the point. What I am telling you is that the ride is happening either way, and that there is one posture in which the ride breaks you, and another posture in which the ride is the most exhilarating thing you will ever do.

My father chose the second one. He chose it on every coaster, in every business decision, in every move into a new technology, in every refusal to live a life smaller than the one he was capable of.

When the cancer came, near the end, he was still doing it.

I will tell you about that later in this book.

For now, just hold the picture. Grandfather, hands up. Grandson, gripping the bar. The lesson, mid-air, on a coaster that was, in retrospect, much shorter than any of us had hoped.

That is who he was.

That is what he taught me.

Hands up. Smile the whole ride.

The line runs through all of us.

We all have our hands up.

The Inheritance

Here is what my father gave me.

He taught me to be curious.

He didn’t teach me what to think. He taught me how to think.

He taught me to be first.

He taught me not to be afraid.

Those four sentences are the bedrock. Everything else I am about to write is what I built on top of them.

Here is the longer version, in no particular order.

The certainty that the limits of what is possible are not where most people place them. He proved that with the rings of Saturn.

The understanding that the most foundational work in any era is usually done quietly, by people who will not be on magazine covers, in industries that the next generation will inherit without knowing how it got there. He proved that with the MICR encoder.

The belief that you ship the thing. You do not talk about shipping the thing. You do not write a business plan for shipping the thing. You ship it. He proved that nine times over, between 1980 and 1984, on a 48K machine, in his garage, after dinner.

The knowledge that conviction is worth more than convenience, every single time. He proved that the day he walked out of that warehouse on Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

The instinct to put my hands up on the scariest rides instead of gripping the bar. He proved that on every coaster we ever rode together.

And the lived experience of watching a serious person do serious work — in public, in private, in the garage, at the kitchen table, day after day after day, for the entire length of my childhood. Most kids grow up without ever seeing what that looks like. I grew up immersed in it. Whatever discipline I have now, whatever willingness I have to put my head down and do twenty years of work in an industry most people considered unglamorous, whatever instinct I have to bet on technologies before they are obvious — all of it traces back to him.

He died on October 6, 2019.

I am writing this in 2026. He has been gone for almost seven years. That is long enough that I am supposed to be past the rawest parts of it. I am not. I do not think I will ever be entirely past it. The grief has changed shape. It has not gone anywhere.

What it has done is become a fuel.

The work I have done since he died is not the work I would have done if he had lived. I am sure of that. The agency is bigger. The product stack is more ambitious. The willingness I have to put myself, in public, in front of contractors and CEOs and investors, and tell them what is coming whether they want to hear it or not — that has all been forged in the years since I lost him. He would tell me that it is mine, that I would have gotten there without him. I do not believe that. The work is what it is because I lost him, and because losing him taught me that you do not get an unlimited number of years to do the thing you are supposed to do.

He had sixty-five years.

In those sixty-five years, he taught me the rings of Saturn, he taught machines to read, he shipped nine commercial software titles on a 48K computer, he turned down a job from Bill Gates and Paul Allen, he taught me to ride the scariest roller coasters with my hands up and a smile, and he raised a daughter who would, decades later, find herself sitting at a keyboard writing the first edition of an annual letter that she hopes someday her grandson will read.

The line runs through both of them.

I am in the middle.

That is what this book is about.