I was born when I was seven.  I say that because it's when I moved from Brooklyn, NY to Germany. Don't get me wrong, I am American and have spent the majority of my adult life in the US, but living in Germany changed my life. Being in Europe during my formative teenage years afforded a pretty diverse upbringing and had a strong influence on who I am today. It was not your typical, 'spend a year in Europe' situation. Imagine being half-Asian and half-Jewish living in Germany as part of a U.S. military community. With a dad who was an art teacher. Now place yourself in a very small German farming village in the state of Bavaria, a region known for it's Oktoberfest, a BMW factory, and the Disney-inspired Neuschwanstein castle. We played with the farmer's kids. It was great.  We saw things most kids, and even adults, dream of seeing - France's Louvre, Spain's Alhambra, Rome's coliseum, Turkey's blue mosque, Germany's Alps, and more. As a teacher, my father had the summers off allowing us to travel.  

 

After high school in Germany, I moved back to the US to attend college in New York. I applied for, and was accepted to a full scholarship program that let me study at the National University of Singapore and included travel to Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong. During my college summers, I lived with my grandmother in Brooklyn and worked in New York City as a fill-in doorman and maintenance worker. Later in life as a professional, Microsoft afforded me an amazing number of career experiences traveling to China, Japan, Israel, and back to Germany and Singapore for work.  

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In the late 1990s life shifted to settling down. I bought my own home in the Seattle area.  It was the first time I owned my own garage and a space I could shape.  There I started taking ideas, distilling them down, and building things - furniture made from an old door, an electric guitar designed and built from scratch, an adjustable-height swing for my younger and older kid to both use.  

 

At work, I love to hear new ideas from people and love it even more when we get them build into something other people can experience.  It's very rewarding both in life and work. I believe that all these different experiences have really helped provide a unique perspective on different cultures, people, and an openness to diverse ideas as well as pleasure in seeing them come to fruition.