Born Between Two Eras

I was born in 1975.

My father was twenty-one. My mother was twenty. They had been married for three years. They were already, in the quiet way they did almost everything important, building the life that would end up holding all of us. They had already started the band. They had already started writing each other letters. They had already, between them, decided that they were going to be the kind of parents who let a child climb a twelve-foot ladder in the dark to look at a planet.

I came along, and the architecture of our family fell into place around me.

My Mother

Before I take you any further into my own life, I have to tell you about my mother.

Linda has been on the edges of this book for the entire first chapter. She was the one who saved the envelope my father addressed to her in 1972. She was the one in the band. She was the one who called me in Las Vegas on October 5, 2019 and said “Dad isn’t feeling well”. She was the one who slugged my father in the shoulder ten years after the Bill Gates meeting and said the sentence I will carry for the rest of my life. She was the one who had to cancel the cruise.

She has been a supporting character so far. She is not a supporting character. She is one of the four people the line of this book runs through, and the only one who is currently still alive and reading every paragraph in real time as I write it. She deserves her own portrait. Here it is.

My mother is, in the most literal sense, the person who made my father possible.

That is not a romantic flourish. That is a structural observation. The man I have been describing in Chapter One — the engineer at Maverick Microsystems, the nine-time Apple II software author, the man who turned down Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the pianist, the photographer, the spelunker, the chess player who could not be beaten — that man could not have done all of those things at the same time, in one human lifetime, without a partner who was running half of his life for him. The half of his life that was not the work. The half that was the kitchen and the calendar and the keeping-track-of-the-people. My mother ran that half.

And before all of that, before any of the rest of it, she was already his partner.

My mother and father were married in October of 1972. They had been together for years before that. By the time my father bought his first Apple II in 1979 and started shipping commercial software, they had already been operating as a unit for almost a decade. The decision to ship software was not his alone. The decision to take the Maverick job was not his alone. The decision to keep working on a video game in the back room of the house at midnight while everyone else in the neighborhood was asleep was not his alone. Every one of those decisions ran through a kitchen table conversation with my mother. The two of them decided what kind of life they were going to build together, and then he went and built one half of it while she built the other half, and the half she built held the half he built up.

I want you to hold that fact in your hands when you think about who my parents were as people. The same man who would eventually walk out of a warehouse on Bill Gates and Paul Allen had, before that, spent years sitting at a kitchen table with a young woman named Linda Closer figuring out how the two of them were going to make a life together. The same woman who would later cancel a fiftieth-anniversary cruise to the Galápagos had, in her early twenties, been the person who taught my father what it looked like to choose somebody and stay chosen.

They were, both of them, that kind of person.

My mother brought music into the house. She also brought — and I want to be careful with how I describe this because the word that most people would expect me to use here is the wrong word — something other than gentleness. My mother is not a gentle woman. My mother is bold. My mother is afraid of nothing. My mother is the kind of woman who will tell you exactly what she thinks, in the room where she is thinking it, with no varnish, and you will be better for the telling whether you wanted to be or not. She has been that way my entire life. She is that way now.

She brought structure into the house. She brought discipline. She brought organization. She brought the kind of operational presence that meant the household ran on a schedule, the calendar got honored, the checks got mailed on time, the food was on the table at the hour the food was supposed to be on the table, and the people inside her care were prepared for whatever the day was about to ask of them. She did not bring softness. She brought efficacy.

My mother is also strong as hell. She is loving. She is kind. She will outwork anyone in a room — man, woman, or child — and the rest of us, who have been trying to keep up with her our entire lives, run circles trying to match her cadence and lose, every time. She does it without commentary. She does not call attention to it. She just operates at a level of sustained capacity the rest of us are still studying.

She is the reason I can run this company, this life, and multiple households the way I do.

I want to land that sentence carefully because it is the structural argument of this section. The agency, the marriage, the home in Houston, the home in Greenlake, the schedule that has me speaking from stages and operating inside code and preparing for the AI restructure of an industry while the calendar continues to ask me for everything else a fifty-something woman’s life asks for — all of that runs on the operational discipline I learned from my mother. I am, as I write this, in the middle of preparing my home for a gathering this week of fifty trades contractors, in May of 2026, alongside everything else I have on the calendar. I can do that without losing my mind because my mother taught me how. She did not teach me by sitting me down and explaining a system. She taught me the way she taught me everything — by doing it in front of me, every day of my childhood, until the doing of it became part of how I understood what running a life was supposed to look like.

She is the reason I can move from behind ten screens of code and AI agents in the morning to a room of fifty contractors in the evening without changing posture. She is the reason I can pull myself out of the introvert’s position I take with developers and engineers — the long quiet hours, the deep technical work, the side of me that prefers the keyboard to the audience — grab a microphone, walk on stage in front of a thousand-person room, and deliver a keynote without hesitation and without preparation. That is not native confidence. That is the inheritance of a woman who taught me, by example, that there is no room you cannot operate in if you have done the work to be the person who walks into it.

Through the arrival of an only child. Through the years he was up until two in the morning shipping commercial software while she was up at six in the morning getting that only child to school. Through the move onto the paddlewheeler. Through the cancer. Through the day the trial team killed him. Through the cancellation of the cruise. Through six years of widowhood. Through the arrival of a grandson she now adores so completely — my mother has been the operational engine of this family for fifty-three years and counting. Whatever she has had to absorb, she has absorbed. Whatever she has had to do, she has done. She has not asked for credit. She has not waited for the rest of us to notice. She has just kept going.

My mother is, at the time of this writing, the person in this family I admire most in the world.

And she is reading this book in real time as I write it.

Hi, Mom.

The Analog Childhood

I grew up at the front of a wave most people did not know was coming.

That is the sentence I want to start this chapter with, because it captures the structural fact of my childhood more accurately than the simpler version I have told audiences from a stage for years. The simpler version is “I grew up without the internet.” That is true at the level of the broader culture I grew up inside. It is not true at the level of the household I grew up inside. The two things were different, and the difference is the entire reason I have spent the rest of my adult life able to see the next wave before the rest of my industry sees it.

I grew up at the front of a wave most people did not know was coming.

The broader culture I grew up inside was analog. Most of America in the late 1970s and through the 1980s was operating without personal computers, without the public web, without email in the home, without mobile phones. If a friend wanted to reach me, she called the phone that was attached to the wall in our kitchen. If she was not home, I called back later. If I wanted to know what time a movie started, I called the theater. If I wanted to know what a word meant, I opened a dictionary. There was no shortcut. There was no agent. There was no model. There was no search bar. There was no Alexa or Grok — Valentine, the name I gave mine. The world I shared with the kids on my block was a world made of unstructured hours, the books on the shelves, the people in the room, and the slow patience of a generation that had not yet been given a phone to fill its hands.

The household I grew up inside was different.

My father was an engineer, a developer, and an inventor. The technology that was about to change the broader culture had been arriving in our house for years before it arrived in anyone else’s. We had the Apple II in the office before any of my friends had a computer. We had the first Macintosh shortly after it was released in 1984, when most of America had still never seen one. We had the Atari in the house before most of my friends had any video game console at all. We had the dark room processing photographs before any of my friends had a darkroom. We had the homemade telescope in the garage that an eight-year-old could climb a twelve-foot ladder to look through, and none of my friends had that either. We had a big ass cell phone in the era when most families I knew did not have a cell phone at all — the kind of device that took two hands to hold and looked like the future had been delivered to our house in advance and we had simply forgotten to mention it to the neighbors. By the time the rest of the world was going to start asking questions about how the future worked, I had already been watching the future arrive in the rooms of my own house for the entire length of my childhood.

That is the texture I want you to register. I was not in the living room while the future happened in the next room. I was in the next room with him. I was in the office while he was deep in code. I was in the dark room while he was processing prints. I was in the garage while he was building the telescope that would later let me see Saturn for myself. The future was not happening to me. I was inside it. I had a father who was deliberately putting me inside it, year after year, on the assumption that some of what he was working on would eventually matter and that his daughter should have a head start on the world that was coming.

That head start is the thing the broader culture’s analog texture sometimes obscures. Most kids my age had unstructured hours and books on the shelves and the slow patience of an analog childhood, and that was good for them and good for me. I had all of that too. I also had a father who was already three steps past the technology of his moment, building what would become the next moment’s infrastructure, and bringing me into the rooms where it was happening before any of my classmates had even encountered the technology that we already considered ordinary.

That was the medium I grew up inside. Both mediums. The slow analog childhood that my generation shared. The early-edge technology household my father built. The two of them together produced a particular kind of mind — patient enough to read a long book, fluent enough to recognize what a piece of software meant when it landed, and trained from a very young age to spot the difference between what was already in the world and what was about to be.

That is the mind I am writing this book with. It is also the mind I have been bringing to my work for thirty years. The reason I have been able to see the AI moment as clearly as I have, as early as I have, is not that I am especially smart. The reason is that I was raised next to a man who had been doing the same kind of seeing his entire life, and who made a deliberate practice of bringing his daughter into the rooms where the seeing happened.

Mosaic

In 1993, when I was eighteen, a piece of software was released that changed the structure of the world.

It was called Mosaic. It was a web browser, developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. It was the first browser that put images and text on the same page in a way ordinary humans could use. Before Mosaic, the early web existed but was almost entirely text — a tool for academics, for researchers, for people who already understood what the internet was. Mosaic made the web visual. Mosaic made the web accessible. Mosaic, more than any other single piece of software, is the reason the rest of the world eventually came online.

I was sitting with my father.

This was at home. He had been working, by 1993, on enterprise networking for the better part of a decade — the kind of plumbing-of-the-corporate-world that does not show up on consumer-press radar but that the people running large companies could not function without. He had been deep inside intranets and extranets for years. The distinction was an active engineering conversation in 1993: an intranet was a private internal network running on internet protocols; an extranet extended the same private network out to selected customers, suppliers, or partners through controlled access. He had been building both. He understood the architecture of how networks talk to networks better than almost anyone I knew.

He was looking at Mosaic on the screen in front of us, and he was already three steps past the screen.

Specifically, what he was discussing — to me, to himself, to anyone in the room willing to follow him there — was the question of who was going to own the .com domain names for every major company on Earth. He could see, in 1993, while the rest of the world was still trying to understand what a web page was, that the names companies put on their letterhead were about to become the names they put on their websites. He could see that there were not very many of those names. He could see that they were available for purchase, right then, by anyone willing to register them. He could see, in real time, the structural land-rush that was about to happen. He talked about which companies he would buy the .coms for, and what each of them would be worth, and what it would mean to own the digital storefront of every Fortune 500 firm before the firms themselves understood that there were digital storefronts to own.

Boy do I wish he had.

He did not. He saw it clearly, articulated it out loud to me, mapped the implications across an industry he had been engineering inside for a decade — and then, the way he sometimes did, he kept building extranets for the day job and let the .com land-rush happen without him. He was a person who saw what was coming. He was not always a person who acted on what he saw. The book is more honest if I tell you that, because the gap between the seeing and the acting is the gap most operators live inside, and the reader who registers that even Kevin Bagley was on the seeing side of the gap more often than the acting side will be more honest with themselves about which side they are on.

What he gave me, that afternoon, was not a specific business idea. It was something larger. He showed me, by talking out loud about the .coms and the network architecture and the implications of the visual web for the structure of commerce, that the entire edifice of how the world organized itself was about to be rebuilt on top of this software. The dictionary, the phone book, the travel agent, the encyclopedia, the card catalog, the printed map, the in-person bank teller — all of it. He was already inside that recognition before the rest of the country had gotten Mosaic running on their machines.

What I understood, even then, was that the rules had changed. The dictionary I had grown up reaching for was about to become obsolete. The phone book I had grown up calling was about to become obsolete. The travel agent, the encyclopedia, the card catalog, the in-person bank teller, the printed map, the printed timetable, the entire scaffolding of how an analog person navigated an analog world — all of it was about to be moved into the box on my desk.

I did not yet know that I was going to spend the next thirty years of my career inside that box. Nobody in 1993 knew. The people building Mosaic did not know. Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN, who had invented the web a few years before, did not fully know. The people who would later build Google and Facebook and Amazon and OpenAI and Anthropic did not yet know. But the box was there, and the box was about to swallow the world, and a few of us — not many — were paying attention.

My father was paying attention. He had been paying attention his entire life. He had been preparing me, without either of us knowing it, since the night he put me on the ladder to look at Saturn.

Michael

I met my husband on November 13, 2013.

Yes. November 13.

My son’s fifteenth birthday.

By the time I met Michael Hicklen, I had been an entrepreneur for years and had raised Torel alone since the day he was born. I had launched CI Web Group in 2006 and had been running it for seven years. I was, by 2013, a known person in my industry, a working mother, a single woman with a house and a teenager and a small company that was growing faster than I could comfortably manage. I was self-sufficient. I was not looking for a husband. I had built a life that did not require one.

And then on November 13, 2013, the date that had already produced my son and my career’s first and most consequential business deal, I met the man who would become my partner for the rest of my life.

November 13 is, at this point, doing structural work in the architecture of my life that I do not have a clean explanation for. My son arrived on November 13, 1998. Daikin selected our agency on November 13, 2008 — ten years to the day. Michael walked into my life on November 13, 2013 — fifteen years to the day. Three of the most foundational events of my adult life happened on the same date, on a five-year cadence, on the same number that has been showing up in our family for as long as I have been an adult.

Michael is, in a sentence, the steady member of our marriage.

There is a reason for that. Before he was my husband, before he was the man who started CI Web Group’s second decade alongside me, Michael Hicklen was a United States Army officer for twenty-five years. He served three combat deployments. He had, by the time we met on November 13, 2013, already done a complete career inside the most operationally disciplined organization in the country. He had been responsible, multiple times in his life, for missions where the stakes were measured in lives rather than in revenue. The steadiness I am about to describe in him — the calm, the not-flinching, the showing-up — did not come from a marketing background. It came from twenty-five years in uniform.

Two years after we met, he retired from the Army. He took the pension. He hung up the uniform. And he came to work at CI Web Group, where he has been ever since.

He went from running operations for the United States military to running operations for a digital marketing agency that specializes in HVAC and plumbing contractors. The transition probably sounds strange on paper. It was not strange in practice. The skills are more transferable than people realize. The man who tells colleagues “I make sure she’s taken care of” is also the man who knows how to build a team, how to make a plan, how to execute under pressure, how to take responsibility when something goes wrong, how to give credit when something goes right. Those are the skills of a senior operator at any company doing serious work. They are also the skills of a husband whose self-description is identical to his job description. Michael did not have to learn those skills when he joined CI Web Group. He brought them in the door.

I am the wild one. Ridiculously structured in business and completely unstructured at the same time. Evolving rapidly. I am the one with the visions, the keynotes, the late-night deployments, the company restructures, the bets on technologies most of my industry thinks are too early, the agencies inside the agency, the projects inside the projects. Michael is the one who keeps the household and the family functional while I am building the next thing. He is the one who, when my mother called me in Las Vegas in October 2019 with the call I had been refusing to wait for, did not wait either. He is the one who started driving north on the tumbleweed highway before I had registered that we were leaving the hotel. He is the one who pulled cash out of his pocket in the airport and offered a stranger a thousand dollars for a seat. He is the one who, when I cried for six hours straight on a plane to Seattle, sat next to me and did not say a single thing because he understood there was nothing to say.

That is the Michael of a crisis.

The Michael of a Tuesday is the man who makes coffee. The man who handles the dog. The man who answers the contractors at the front door whether the door is in Houston or Seattle or wherever Tuesday happens to be. I am never on the road without him. We are on the road, and he handles everything from anywhere and everywhere — the household functions, the contractor calls, the family logistics, the email queue, the appointments back home that need someone to call the vendor or the cleaning service or the property manager. He runs all of it from wherever we are. The Michael of a Tuesday is the man who has, for twelve years now, been my reliable second brain on every major decision — not because he overrules me but because he listens to me think out loud until I can hear what I actually believe.

When people at the office ask Michael what he actually does at CI Web Group, his answer has been the same for a decade. “I make sure she’s taken care of.” That is the whole job description. He says it without irony. He means it. He is my protector. He is my security. He is my road dog. He is my life partner. Each of those words is doing different work — protector is who he is when something threatens me, security is who he is when I need to feel safe enough to do hard work, road dog is the person who actually goes places with me and drives and sits next to me at the events, and life partner is the legal and emotional category that holds all of it. He is all four of those at once, every day, and the company runs the way it runs because he is.

If I had to name the one identification of those four that captures who Michael actually is at his core, it would be the second one. He is, fundamentally, my detail guard and security. Everything else — the road-dog travel, the logistics coordination, the air-traffic-controller work he does at the events — is something he does in service of that core identity. The protecting is not a role he performs. It is who he is. The other roles are the operational expressions of it.

I have seen him with a 50 cal. I have seen him with an automatic rifle. I have seen him with an automatic Glock. It is sexy as hell. I am writing that down in print because the truth of who Michael is includes the wife’s eye on the husband’s competence, and pretending the competence is not also attractive would be sanitizing the marriage. He was trained in twenty-five years of uniformed service and three combat deployments to handle the most capable weapons platforms the United States military operates, and the training did not turn off when he left the Army. The reader who is going to absorb the rest of this section needs to register that the man I have been describing is, factually, a person whose protective instinct is backed by combat-grade competence. The protective instinct itself, in our marriage, looks like the daily practices I am about to describe. The competence underneath the practices is what makes the practices land.

Michael positions himself in every room to watch all the exits. He learned this in uniform and he never stopped doing it. The reflex did not turn off. It is on, every event, every venue, every room we walk into together. He is also tracking my exact position in the room at all times. In a crowded ballroom of eight hundred people, with me at one end working a rope line and him at the other end in a corner near a service door, he knows where I am, what direction I am facing, who is approaching me, and how long it has been since I last drank water. I do not have to look for him. I do not have to text him. If I need him, he is already moving. If I do not need him, he is already in the position from which he can move the moment I do. He opens every door I walk through. Every door. Twelve years of doors. The protector and the security identifications from the four-word list are not abstractions. They are a man in a room who has been trained to know exactly where his person is and exactly which doors lead out, every minute of every event, for twelve years and counting.

Michael and I travel together. We have since the day we met. We travel six months a year for speaking events, based out of our Houston home for travel season and our Seattle home for the summers and winters when we want to be near family. Half of every year is on the road. The other half is the two of us, and the family, and the work that happens between trips. On the road, the air-traffic-controller side of his work kicks in. He coordinates the logistics, the bookings, the vendor relationships, the schedule changes, the dietary requirements at the hotel, the green-room arrangements, the timing of when I need to walk on stage. He keeps track of every event detail well enough that he can tell me, in real time, where we are right now and where we need to be next. He tells me who I am speaking to. He tells me what my topic is. He tells me which version of the keynote we are giving today, because we have written six versions and the version that fits this audience is the version he has already pulled up in his notes by the time I am asking. He remembers everything about everyone we have ever encountered — the conference organizer’s daughter who just got married, the operations director who had a heart attack two years ago, the contractor in the back of the room who shook my hand at a different event in 2019 and asked a specific question I can now reference back to him in the rope line. The logistics work is the surface. The detail-guard work is the foundation. He is doing the logistics so that the protection is uninterrupted, not the other way around.

There are smaller pieces of texture I want to register because they tell the reader what the marriage actually looks like in the daily run. He surprises me with presidential suites on long trips — he sees how hard I am running on the road and decides, without being asked, that the room I am sleeping in deserves to be a room a CEO would actually want to come back to at the end of a fifteen-hour day. He makes me feel safe. The safety is not a feeling-word, it is an operational fact — because Michael is keeping the world running around me, I can lose myself in a project in an airport lounge and not miss my flight, because he will come find me. I am no longer late to meetings. I no longer miss flights because I got caught up in something interesting. He has absorbed the management of the surrounding world so completely that the version of my work life that exists now is one where I get to stay inside the work itself, and the world around the work stays running, and the gap between the two is filled by him.

There is one piece of this I have not said to him directly that I am about to say in print, and the printing is going to start a conversation I have been quietly avoiding for twelve years. I rarely tell Michael about the haters. The contractor industry, the conference circuit, the AI-discourse community, the social-media response to my work — there are people in each of those who do not like me, who say things they would not say to my face, who occasionally cross the line into behavior that, if Michael knew about it, would activate the part of him that was trained to handle threats at scale. I know what he is capable of. I have learned to absorb most of it myself rather than tell him, because the cost of activating that part of him is too high and I would rather absorb the noise than ask him to do something the rest of his life would have to live with. I am sure this passage is going to be a conversation between us after he reads this book. I am writing it anyway, because the truth of who Michael is includes the part where his wife filters the world for him in a particular direction, the same way he filters the world for her in every other direction. The marriage works because the filtering goes both ways. He carries the load on his side. I carry the load on mine. Most of the time, neither of us has to name what the other one is carrying. The book is the place where I am naming it.

In the beginning we were complete opposites. The wild founder and the steady officer. The visionary chasing the next thing and the operator running the day-to-day. The woman who would commit to a deployment at midnight and the man who would have wanted thirty-six hours of mission planning before agreeing to anything. Over twelve years of marriage we have got closer and closer to living in the middle. He has absorbed some of my willingness to move fast. I have absorbed some of his discipline around making the plan before the plan starts. The middle is where we live now. We still default to our cores under pressure — he gets steadier when things are hard, I get faster — but the daily texture of the marriage is the version of both of us that has been bending toward the other for a long time. That is what a long marriage actually is. The opposites do not become the same person. They become two people who have spent enough years in the same room to know what the other one is going to do before the other one knows.

There are pieces of who Michael is that the detail-guard-and-security framing does not capture, and I want to register them because they are what the marriage actually feels like to live inside.

Mike is who I explore the world with. He is who I study AI with — we read the same papers, watch the same model releases, compare notes on what the labs are shipping, work through the implications together at the dinner table the way most couples talk about the news. He is who I love taking wrong turns with. The wrong turns are part of how we travel — the missed exits, the unplanned detours, the restaurants we found because we got lost looking for somewhere else — and he is the man I want to be lost with when the directions stop matching the road.

He is strength. He is a force to be reckoned with. The protective identity I described earlier is one expression of that strength, but the strength itself is broader than the training. He is the calm that absorbs the chaos. He is the steady that lets me run fast.

He is also, now, grandpa. Dallas was born on October 19, 2025, and the man who has been my detail guard and security and life partner became, in the space of one afternoon, also a grandfather. Michael has the touch with the baby that nobody else in the family has. He is the one who can put Dallas to sleep when nothing else is working. The combat-grade competence does not disappear when he is holding a sleeping six-month-old. It just gets quieter. He has big shoes to fill. The great-grandfather Dallas would have had if my father had lived to October 2025 was the man who put his eight-year-old daughter on a twelve-foot ladder in a garage to look at Saturn through a homemade telescope, and Michael knows that. He is stepping into a role another man would have filled, and he is doing it the only way a man with his integrity could do it — by not pretending the other man is not there, by knowing whose grandson he is holding, and by showing up anyway, every day, with the baby and the bottle and the calm hands and the willingness to be the second grandfather in the lineage of a child who will eventually be old enough to ask about the first one.

Every CEO who has accomplished anything has someone like Michael. Most of them do not name the person in print.

I am going to.

Hi, Michael. Thank you for the last twelve years. Thank you for the cash in the airport. Thank you for the silence on the plane. Thank you for picking up on November 13, 2013, on the day my son was turning fifteen, on the date that has been quietly running my life since the year my son was born.

You are the line too.

Before The Agency

I was an entrepreneur for as long as I had been an adult. But before I was an entrepreneur, I was something else. I was a person who got hired by big companies to figure out things that did not yet have a name.

Between college and the founding of CI Web Group, I worked in retail enterprise technology. I want to walk you through it because the through-line from those years to now is, in retrospect, the most direct line in my entire career, and most of the people who have known me over the last twenty years have no idea I was doing this work in my twenties.

I worked at Lamonts Apparel.

I worked at Nordstrom.

I worked at Tommy Bahama.

I worked at Fossil.

Four major retail companies. At each of them, I was doing some version of the same job: implementing supply chain management and compliance solutions. Building the systems that allowed inventory to move, that allowed orders to flow, that allowed retailers and their suppliers to talk to each other in a language the machines could understand. I was the person who walked into the room and said “we can do this faster, with fewer errors, if we wire it up correctly.” Then I would lead the project that wired it up.

I want to be clear about the era I am describing.

This was before “supply chain management” was a thing you could go to college and study. There was no degree program. There was no certification. There were no consultants packaging the playbook because the playbook was being written, in real time, by people like me, in conference rooms at companies like the ones I just listed, while the rest of the business world was still figuring out what email was.

The technologies I was deploying were the bleeding edge of their time. Electronic Data Interchange — EDI — the standardized digital format that allowed retailers and their suppliers to exchange purchase orders, invoices, and shipment notices without paper. RFID — radio-frequency identification — which most consumers had never heard of and which would not become a Walmart-mandated standard for major suppliers until 2003. UPC barcodes integrated into modern inventory systems. Dynamic routing for distribution — the algorithms that decided which warehouse a product should ship from, on which truck, on which day, to optimize cost and time. All of it new. All of it being figured out as I was deploying it.

Any technology project I could learn and lead, I led. Any system I could implement, I implemented. Any vendor I could partner with, I partnered with. Any compliance standard I could help write, I helped write. I was, in my twenties, doing for retail supply chain exactly what my father had been doing for banking when I was a child — working on the foundational layer of how machines were going to talk to each other, in an industry that did not yet realize how dependent it was about to become on those conversations.

And then there was SAP.

I led three global SAP implementations.

If you have not worked in enterprise technology, that sentence may not register at the right scale. Let me translate it. SAP — Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing — is the largest enterprise resource planning system in the world. It is the software that runs the back office of more than two-thirds of the Fortune 500. It handles inventory, finance, supply chain, human resources, manufacturing, distribution, procurement — the entire operational core of how a global company keeps track of itself. Implementing SAP is not buying a piece of software. It is rewiring the operational nervous system of an entire enterprise.

A single global SAP implementation is, on average, an eighteen-month-to-multi-year program. It costs tens of millions of dollars. It involves hundreds of stakeholders across multiple countries. It touches every department in the company. It has, historically, an alarming failure rate — the consulting industry has spent decades writing books about why SAP implementations fail and what to do about it. Most enterprise technology leaders never lead one. Of the ones who do, most never lead a second one. Three is rare. Three “global” is rarer.

I led three of them by the time I was in my late twenties.

I am not going to walk you through the technical details of those programs in this book. They were what they were. Each one was its own war. Each one taught me, in slightly different ways, the same set of lessons: how to land an enterprise transformation in a room full of people who did not want it, how to build alignment across countries and time zones, how to translate between executives and engineers, how to keep a multi-year program on the rails when the budget was bleeding and the team was exhausted, how to ship something foundational and then walk away from it because it had become operational and somebody else’s job.

Those are the actual skills of a CEO. I did not know that at the time. I was just doing the work.

By the time I was twenty-eight years old, I was a six-figure executive with stock options.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, in retail enterprise IT, that was the kind of trajectory you stayed on. The corporate ladder was working. The compensation was working. The recognition was working. The path forward was clear: ride it for another thirty years, retire as a CIO of a major retail company, do well, do good, end on a high. Most of the people I worked alongside took that path. Most of them are doing it still.

I walked away.

Entrepreneurship was calling my name.

I am going to put that sentence on its own line because it is, structurally, the moment my life changed direction. I was twenty-eight years old. I had a salary most people would consider a destination. I had stock options that, in a few more years of vesting, were going to be worth real money. I had a corporate trajectory that any career counselor would have told me to protect. And I knew, in a way I could not fully articulate at the time, that none of it was actually the work I was supposed to be doing.

The work I was supposed to be doing was the work my father had modeled for me when I was eight years old, on a twelve-foot ladder, in our garage. The work of building something. The work of starting from nothing and shipping the thing. The work of being the person whose name was on the box, whose plaque was on the shelf, whose code was on the disk, whose decision it was when the project went live.

I was good at running other people’s programs. I was great at it. But I was not raised to run other people’s programs. I was raised to build my own.

So I left.

I want to acknowledge how unusual that decision looked at the time, and to whom. I had a young son. His father was not part of the picture, and had not been for some time. I was self-sufficient. I had been raising my son largely on my own, supporting both of us on my own salary, and I was about to walk away from that salary and start a small company in an unproven category.

By any conventional measure, that was a decision I should not have made.

I made it anyway.

My father had walked out of a warehouse on Bill Gates and Paul Allen because their philosophy did not match his. I had walked out of a corporate executive track because the work did not match who I was raised to be. The shape of the decision was identical. He had taught me, without sitting me down to teach me, that conviction was worth more than convenience, every single time. When my turn came, I knew what to do.

I want you to feel the symmetry of this for a moment, because it took me decades to fully see it.

My father was an early commercial pioneer in pattern recognition and machine reading. His work, which was unglamorous in the 1980s, would later turn out to be foundational to nearly everything we now call artificial intelligence — OCR, computer vision, document processing, the entire stack of “machines reading things” that AI systems now do at scale.

I was an early commercial pioneer in supply chain digitization and retail compliance technology. My work, which was unglamorous in the 1990s and early 2000s, would later turn out to be foundational to nearly everything we now call e-commerce — inventory APIs, fulfillment logistics, dropshipping infrastructure, last-mile routing, the entire stack of “retail moving online” that the world now takes for granted.

Neither of us got the credit for it. Most early people do not. The companies that came along ten and fifteen years later, with prettier interfaces and bigger marketing budgets, are the ones whose names you remember. The people who did the early, ugly, foundational work — the people in the offices with the green code on the screens, in the warehouses with the EDI feeds, in the conference rooms with the RFID consultants — are mostly invisible in the popular history.

My father was one of those invisible people. So was I.

That is what I mean, in this book, when I say I was raised to be early. My father was teaching machines to read checks before “machines reading things” was a category. I was teaching retailers to track inventory before “supply chain” was a category. We were both, in our own industries, working on the layer of technology that would later become so universal that people would forget anyone had to build it.

And then, in 2006, I started a digital marketing company for trades contractors.

Which sounds, to a stranger, like a complete pivot.

It was not a pivot. It was the same instinct, applied to a third industry. The Bagley instinct. The instinct to walk into a room full of analog operators and say “we can do this faster, with fewer errors, if we wire it up correctly,” and then lead the project that wires it up.

I have been doing some version of that one job my entire working life.

I am still doing it now. The agents we are deploying for HVAC and plumbing and electrical and roofing and garage-door companies in 2026 are, structurally, the same as the EDI feeds I was deploying for Nordstrom in the late 1990s and the MICR encoder my father was deploying for the American banking system in the 1970s. We are wiring up an industry that did not yet know it was about to be wired up. We are doing the foundational work that, fifteen years from now, somebody else will get the credit for. That is fine. That is the work.

That is what we do.

The Year of Google

In 1998, two things happened that would, in different ways, define the rest of my life.

On September 4, 1998, two graduate students at Stanford named Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated a company called Google.

On November 13, 1998, ten weeks later, my son Torel was born.

I want you to hold those two dates next to each other for a moment, because in the ten-week window between them, the world quietly tipped.

Google was, on the day it was incorporated, a graduate-school research project with a search algorithm and a strange name. It had no office. It had a few investors. It had no idea what it was about to become. By the time my son was three months old, Google had a garage in Menlo Park. By the time my son was a year old, it had its first real round of funding. By the time my son was old enough to read, Google was the verb everyone used for finding anything. By the time my son was a teenager, Google had become the largest organizer of information in human history, and the entire architecture of how a person navigated the world had been quietly rewritten around it.

My son was born inside that rewriting.

He has never lived a single day of his conscious life in a world without Google. He has never had to ask another human being for the answer to a factual question. He has never opened a phone book. He has never used a card catalog. He has never had to memorize a phone number, because his phone has memorized them for him since he was old enough to carry one. He grew up at the exact hinge between the world I came from and the world Dallas now lives in.

That is what I mean when I say my son was born between two eras.

I was born in 1975 — fully analog. My grandson was born in 2025 — fully agentic, before he can speak. My son was born in 1998 — right at the seam. He is the bridge generation. He is the only generation in modern history that has had to learn, mid-life, how to cross the entire gap between a world that did not know it was going to be replaced and a world that has already replaced it.

And his birth date — November 13, 1998 — is, I want you to know, not just the day he arrived. It is the first thirteen of my adult life.

Torel

Torel does not get dramatic.

Torel does not panic.

Those are the two sentences I would lead with if a stranger asked me to describe my son in the fewest possible words. He is twenty-seven years old at the time of this writing. He has been the calm member of every room he has ever walked into. He has been the calm member, at certain moments, of rooms in which I was not the calm one and badly needed somebody to be.

This was not always obvious.

I had an emergency C-section. The medical team was working at the lower end of the table. My father was behind the curtain at my head, in scrubs and a mask. He was, as far as I know, the only family member in the operating room with me, and he was in complete amazement at what he was watching. The scientist in him was on full display. He narrated the surgery as it happened — like an announcer calling a game, except the game was the doctor making the incision, stretching open my stomach, reaching his entire arm in past the elbow, and carefully bringing my son out. To Kevin, it was all so cool, and he was going to tell the room about it as it was happening.

His humor was awesome for me. The C-section is a serious surgery. The fear in the moment is real. My father standing behind the curtain narrating the procedure like it was the most exciting science demonstration of his life kept me steady through the part of the operation when steady was hard to find. I remember every word he said. Some people would have looked away. My father looked harder. Some people would have stayed quiet. My father announced.

My father met my son first.

That is the picture above. Kevin Michael Bagley, forty-four years old, in surgical scrubs and a cap and a mask, holding the seven-pound-thirteen-ounce baby who had just arrived. My father is looking down at Torel with the same expression he had used on me when I was eight years old, climbing a twelve-foot ladder in our garage to look at Saturn. The expression was: “Well. Here you are. Let’s see what we can do with this.”

My father held my son before I could. He was the first person, after the medical staff, to put his hands on him. That is a thing my mother and I have noted to each other in the years since my father died — the small, lucky fact that my father got the first hold. He was there. He saw him first.

Torel as a baby was, by every account I can find, an easy baby. He slept. He ate. He looked at things. He had the same temperament at six months old that he has at twenty-seven. Nothing rushed. Nothing performative. A small, patient observer who did not need most of the things other babies seemed to need.

We played chess — just like me and my dad, half a generation earlier. The chess board, in my family, has been the inheritance. Kevin taught me the openings and the endgames. I taught Torel the same openings and the same endgames. Three generations of the same game, played across the same kitchen table in different houses in different decades. I did not just put him in conference rooms. I put him on planes. By the time Torel was fifteen, he had been to more countries and more states than most people visit in their entire lives.

And by twelve, he had started to build.

Specifically, by age twelve, Torel was building tools to automatically get followers on social media and automate posting using IFTTT — the early-2010s conditional-logic platform that let users wire automations between web services. “If This Then That.” That was not an ordinary kid using social media. That was a kid who had already absorbed the engineering instinct his grandfather Kevin had passed through me. I still have videos of him teaching my clients how to do it. Adult business owners, paying clients of CI Web Group, sitting at conference room tables while my twelve-year-old son walked them through how to wire IFTTT logic to their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

I remember the night specifically. Michael and I had come home from a speaking engagement, exhausted, ready to settle on the couch and decompress. We walked through the door and the kids were waiting. They took our phones — not as a metaphor, literally took the phones out of our hands so we could not check email or scroll while they spoke — and made us sit on the couch. They had built a presentation. A real presentation. Slides, structure, an argument, a recommendation. The CEO and her combat-trained husband sat on a couch in our own house and got educated by the next generation about an investment category we had been overlooking. We took the lesson. We acted on it.

That moment was the structural pivot point. The kids who had been raised inside the architecture I had been raised inside were now adults whose understanding of the new world had outpaced ours, and they were assertive enough — raised, after all, to think for themselves and to argue any position they could defend — to walk us through what we needed to know. That is what compounding looks like in a family. The architecture does not just repeat. It does not just extend. It compounds, in both directions, across every generation that is in the room together.

There is one more thing I want to register about Torel, because it is the moment that proved who he was as an adult and who he was going to be for the rest of his life. On October sixth, 2019, when my dad was in the emergency room and the medical team was working on him and my mother could barely stand, Torel was in the room. So was Liz. The two of them at twenty and twenty were the calm in the room when nobody else could be calm. Torel was the one who handled the call that flipped the car around on the Vegas highway. Torel was the one who, after my dad died, picked up his phone in the Seattle hospital and texted me on a plane: “I’m sorry mom, grandpa didn’t make it, he’s gone. I love you so much.” He was twenty years old. He had been preparing for that role his entire life, without either of us knowing he was preparing. My father had been teaching him the same lesson since the day he held him in the delivery room: when the moment arrives, you do not flinch. You hold the ladder. You make the call. You do the thing. Torel held the ladder. He made the call. He did the thing. He has been the rock ever since.

He is also, I should be honest with you, the boy who was small and terrified in the picture I showed you in Chapter One. The roller coaster picture. The one where my father had his hands up and Torel was gripping the bar with his eyes huge. That was the same boy. He was, for a while, the kid who was not yet sure he had inherited the lesson my father was teaching him. He had to grow into it.

He grew into it.

Torel met Liz when they were both still in high school.

When we first got Liz, she was meek and quiet. Highly intelligent, straight-A student who loved to read. The kind of teenager you could miss in a room because she was watching everything from the corner without saying much. The Liz of the Bagley dinner table over the next fifteen years became someone different — not by becoming louder, exactly, but by growing into the version of herself that had been there underneath the quietness all along. Torel and Liz have the kind of love my mom and dad had. The kind that does not perform, that does not announce itself, that just builds, year after year, until the architecture is so solid that nothing else needs to be said.

I want to say something here that is not the typical mother-in-law line.

I helped raise Liz.

She came into our house as a high-school girlfriend, the way high-school girlfriends do, and she stayed. She was around enough, for long enough, that the line between “my son’s girlfriend” and “my daughter” quietly disappeared somewhere along the way and was never put back. I am not her mother. She has her own mother and her own family. But I helped raise her, and she knows it.

And I brought her into the business in high school.

That is not a sentence most family memoirs include. I am including it because it is the truth. While Liz was still in high school, I started bringing her into CI Web Group. Small tasks at first. Then bigger ones. She learned the work alongside Torel and Allula, the three of them doing the real operational work of an agency in a world that was about to be transformed by AI. She tried college for a stretch. She gave it a real shot. And then she chose to come back to CI Web Group full time and go all in.

She is now a senior AI vibe coder at the company.

My daughter-in-law writes the AI code that is currently transforming our agency. She is one of the people whose decisions are determining what the company looks like ten years from now. She is the mother of my grandson and she is, simultaneously, one of the people most directly responsible for the fact that the company my grandson will eventually inherit, if he wants it, will still exist in a form worth inheriting.

And Liz brought a name with her.

Slone.

My grandson’s last name is “Bagley-Slone.” That hyphen is a marriage. The first half is my father’s name, carried forward through my son. The second half is Liz’s family name, carried forward through her. Both lines, side by side, in his own name, on every form he will ever fill out for the rest of his life.

That hyphen matters to me more than I have words for.

It matters because my son could have done what an enormous percentage of new fathers do, which is give the baby only the father’s name and call it good. Torel did not do that. He insisted, with Liz, on the hyphen. That decision — small, legal, made on a hospital form — tells you exactly what kind of partner my son is. There is no senior Bagley in that marriage. There is no junior Slone in that marriage. There is a Bagley-Slone, and there always will be.

There is one more person I want to name, because he too has been on the line longer than most readers will assume.

Allula Teka.

Allula has been my son’s best friend since they were children. Not college friend. Not adult friend. Childhood. He and Torel grew up next to each other from elementary school onward. He has been in our house for as long as I have had a house. I consider him family. That is not a euphemism for “close friend.” It is the literal description of how the household functions. He is also Dallas’s uncle.

I helped raise Allula too.

I brought him into the business in high school, the same way I brought Liz in. The three of them — Torel, Liz, and Allula — came up through CI Web Group as teenagers, doing real work, learning the agency from the inside, growing up alongside the company. Allula dabbled in college. He gave it a real try. And then he made the same decision Liz did — he came back full time and went all in.

He has independently become one of the top AI engineers at CI Web Group. “Independently” is the word that matters in that sentence. Nobody placed Allula in the role. Nobody engineered the path for him. He earned it on the work. He is who I work through things with when I am stuck. He is also the person who will stay up till 3 AM with me building some new AI technology in the same session, on the same problem, side by side, when the idea is hot enough that neither of us wants to wait until morning to find out whether it works.

That is not nepotism. That is the natural extension of my father’s pattern. My father built things alongside the people he loved. He taught my cousin Chris, on my mother’s side of the family, to code — a generation before either of them knew there would be a CI Web Group for Chris to be CTO of. Chris’s own son, Braedn Heney, who took the toaster apart at our feet during the early days of the agency, is now one of our top AI engineers. The people you love and the people you build with are the same people.

My son’s wife builds AI for my company. My son’s childhood best friend builds AI for my company. The next generation of CI Web Group is being built by people I helped raise. Liz has been with Torel since high school, in our house since high school, in the business since high school. Allula has been with Torel since elementary school, in our house since elementary school, in the business since high school. They have known each other longer than they have known the technology they are now building. They have known me longer than they have known their own careers.

That is the team. That is the inheritance, applied forward.

My son was born on November 13, 1998.

My father held him first.

And the line, which I had inherited from my father, has now passed cleanly into the hands of a man who does not get dramatic and does not panic, who married the love of his life from high school, who insisted on the hyphen in his son’s last name, and who is raising the next Kevin in our family with the woman who builds the company he is going to inherit.

That is Torel.

That is who he is.

Four men. One photograph.

Left is Allula Teka, my son’s childhood best friend, an AI vibe coder at our agency, a person I helped raise. Center-left is Clayton “Clay” Howard, our Director of Sales, one of the people who has been at the heart of CI Web Group’s commercial growth for years. Center-right is Michael Hicklen, my husband, twenty-five-year Army officer, second decade leader of our agency. Right is Torel Bagley, my son, who has been at this company since he was seven.

They are at the wedding of Jazmin Ramirez, our Executive Director of Growth.

Four senior members of CI Web Group, posed together in formal wear, at the wedding of a fifth. Two of them are family. One is family by marriage. One is family by twenty years of building together.

That is what CI Web Group is. That is what it has always been. The work and the family are not two different things. The line between “the team” and “the family” is, by design, invisible.

That is the Bagley pattern, fifty years on, applied forward into a new generation.

My father would have looked at this photograph and recognized everything in it.

That is the inheritance. That is the line. That is the chapter.

The Thirteen

There is something I have not told you yet about my family.

Thirteen has always been our number.

I am going to tell you the rest of the dates as a single list, because the way you understand a pattern is you put the data points next to each other and you look at them at the same time. Here are the thirteens of my life, the ones I can verify, in order:

November 13, 1998 — my son Torel is born.

Seven pounds. Thirteen ounces.

Read that birth weight again. My son arrived on the thirteenth and weighed thirteen ounces over the pound. The thirteen was inside him before he was outside the room. I have his original birth card on my desk as I write this — plasticized, slightly scratched, kept for twenty-seven years — and the weight is printed underneath his name in a serif font: “Torel Richalbe Bagley, Nov. 13, 1998, 7 Lbs. 13 Oz.” The thirteen is on the card. The thirteen is on the calendar. The thirteen, it turns out, was already in his body before either of us could see it.

January 13, 2006 — CI Web Group launches.

July 13, 2016 — we launch our partnership with Ferguson West, our first major distributor relationship.

November 13, 2008 — Daikin selects CI Web Group as a preferred digital marketing partner. (This date is exactly ten years after my son was born. To the day.)

November 13, 2013 — I meet my husband, Michael Hicklen. (Exactly five years later. Also November 13. Also my son’s birthday — his fifteenth.)

October 19, 2025 — my grandson Dallas is born, exactly thirteen days after the anniversary of his great-grandfather’s death.

December 13, 2025 — we sign Ferguson National.

Seven thirteens. Twenty-seven years. Three on November 13 specifically — my son, my biggest career deal, and my husband, all on the same date, on a five-year cadence. And one of the thirteens is not a date at all. It is a body weight. My son’s. The thirteen, in our family, is not just on the calendar. It is in the bodies.

I am not going to tell you what it means. I do not have a theory. I do not have a tidy explanation. I am not a person who is given to mysticism, and my father, who was also not a person given to mysticism, would have looked at this list, raised an eyebrow, and said something like “huh.” That is what he did when patterns showed up that he could not explain on the first pass. He noted them. He filed them. He kept watching.

That is what I am doing with the thirteens.

My father spent his career teaching machines to recognize patterns in noise. He also taught his only daughter how to do it. He did not teach me to be superstitious. He taught me to be observant. The number thirteen has shown up in our family at a rate that, statistically, is interesting. I do not know why. I am going to keep watching. If a seventh and an eighth show up in the years I have left, I will note them in future editions of this letter.

For now, I just want you to know that the line that runs through this book — Kevin to Jennifer to Torel to Dallas — is also a line of thirteens. And the company that has been the work of my life, CI Web Group, was launched on a thirteen, signed its first major distributor on a thirteen, signed its career-making partner on a thirteen ten years to the day after my son was born, and signed Ferguson National on a thirteen the same year my grandson arrived.

My father would have appreciated that.

He recognized patterns for a living.

He raised a daughter who recognizes them too.