Wednesday of next week, November 4, will be my six-month anniversary at Gradial.
It’s honestly been an incredible first six months, and has left me really grateful for all the things in my life that brought me here.
And that is something I constantly think about. All of the big and little things, both known and unknown, that make any of us who we are and bring us to wherever we happen to be.
The Long Way Here
If I zoom out enough, I can see that my journey to Gradial started November 2, 1929, in Gary, Indiana, when my grandpa, David Kendall, was born. His father didn’t stick around, but he was taken in by a new family when his mother met the man who he would come to regard as his actual dad. And then they put him in Boy Scouts.
I then found myself introduced to the world in Peru, Illinois, in 1983 thanks to his then-19-year-old daughter, Jane, and my dad, Ben. As you might imagine for a couple of such young parents, that didn’t last all that long and not terribly long after, my mom and I moved in with my grandpa and grandma in Alton, Illinois.
Grandpa was, and remains, the most influential man in my life. He was an Eagle Scout and was inducted into the Order of the Arrow, and so I knew that’s what I wanted to do.
So in probably 1989 or so, I joined Tiger Cubs. Then Cub Scouts. Then Boy Scouts, where, around 1998 or so, I found myself talking about the “websites” I was running (on GeoCities… check the 1998 Optimized button) at the camp staff lunch table. Sitting across from me happened to be Michael Halbrook, who was able to handily one-up my GeoCities endeavors by saying he ran a small portfolio of sites for a radio station group across the river in St. Louis.
This moment stuck with me because it suddenly made me realize that was a thing. It was a real option to steer into technology as a career, even in our small-to-mid-sized exurb of St. Louis.
The World of Possibility
About 11 years later, Michael was absorbed into Adobe when it acquired Omniture. I’d never been so jealous and amazed. Suddenly, I knew a guy working at Adobe. Not some neat little local company, a global phenomenon. These folks made Photoshop, for Pete’s sake!
There was someone else I seem to recall at that table, Jameson O’Guinn. Jameson and I would go on to be much better, closer friends than Michael and I, but we all stayed fairly connected. And that’s part of how, in 2013, Jameson found his way to Adobe.
I knew what I had to do and I was set on joining them when, in 2018, both Michael and I were in Jameson’s wedding.
I told Michael about the work I’d been doing at the time and he said, “Ya know, I know our PMO is looking for some new people right now. I could get your résumé to them if you’re interested.” Several interviews later (including one where I was asked if I was “too creative” to be a PM), I found myself in Seattle for an “in-person” panel interview at their offices… where exactly one person besides me was actually in person.
I remember being dead broke when I arrived at my hotel and had to figure out how I could even afford the security hold on the hotel room Adobe paid for me… but somehow I still found a little money for a pour of scotch at the hotel bar that night and a couple beers at the brewery across the street from the office after my interview.
For more than eight years, I absorbed everything. I fed off feedback. I made incredible connections and friends, several of whom I am still in regular contact with today. I led projects and programs for massive engagements at household-name companies. I refined how I think and work.
Every little win and stumble and interaction contributed to the person I was when I called up a friend at Adobe to talk about some feelings of stagnation, and she told me about a coworker of ours on one of those big programs who was now at Gradial and recommended I check them out.
Once again, the world of possibility opened up. Maybe I could work on the bleeding edge of technology and help build something at a startup, rather than maintain it at an enterprise behemoth.
A few months later, there I was. Back in Seattle, preparing for an interview. Only this time, it was to leave Adobe.
Back in Seattle
In these past six months, I have learned so much. I have witnessed the transformative power of frontier AI applications up close and personal. I have met some of the smartest, hardest-working people in my life. I’ve started a recurring “Wins From the Field” series on our #General Slack channel to celebrate wins across the delivery teams each week… and every week, something incredible happens on several accounts.
And on Monday morning, November 2, 2026, 97 years to the day after this journey started for me, I’ll be hopping on a plane to fly back out and spend a week in Seattle with the incredible team at Gradial HQ.
Of course, there were countless other moments, both before and after that November day in 1929, that contributed to bringing me here. These are just the highlights of one path I can trace through them.
Because of Reasons
I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with the phrase “Everything happens for a reason.” Because I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. I believe everything happens because of reasons.
And those reasons have reasons of their own.
And so to me, that’s what that phrase has really come to mean. Not that it’s some divine plan.
Every event is the consequence of countless other events, many of which we’ll never know about. And each becomes a cause of countless more.
My life has not all been great. Grandpa died, as grandpas tend to do. I got a divorce. I’ve struggled with my finances and put myself into uncomfortable positions. I graduated high school with a one-point-something GPA (before turning that all the way around in college) after four years of being decidedly outside the cool group.
That’s not to say I would have chosen every experience along the way. Some of them I would have avoided in a heartbeat, if I’d known how. But we don’t get to control all the experiences that shape us. People die, relationships drift apart, and sometimes we’re just not cool enough to be cool in our teens.
But all of that got me here.
And here, in every sense of that word, is exactly where I want to be.
