blogrium

I was actually hit with that blog meme that’s been going around. This sort of thing doesn’t happen very often on here because I usually don’t choose to participate in them. But since this is apparently one of the weird ones where you tag people to carry it on and I was actually tagged, I figured what the hell. Here are five things you may not know about me:

I was a mean kid when I was little. In pre-school and early elementary school I was a biter, pincher, and overall troublemaker. I’m pretty sure it was about the attention, which I have since channeled into work. I still have a suspension notice from 4th grade explaining:

Jeff brought a stapler/opener/scissors instrument, took it out on the playground and threatened to staple a first grader’s ear and cut another’s leg. He said he was playing.

My mom recently told me that when I was in pre-school, there was an incident when we were all riding tricycles around the playground. One kid decided to go the opposite direction, so I stopped my tricycle, walked over to him and bit his hand.

I have an active interest in producing music. I’ve been playing guitar since I was 14 and for 2 years in high school I spent a lot of my spare time making loop-based electronic music. I have a number of friends into bands and making music and I’ll do recording projects with them now and then, or just jam.

I’ll jam with my dad too every now and then. He plays drums and guitar. In the 80’s he ran a music label called Palace Records and produced a tech-pop artist named Graham Grace and a band called Love Affair. Since Palace went out of business towards the end of the 80’s, he’s been a hobby musician. When I was about 10 he taught me some basic sound engineering to help him record.

I recently started taking piano and I’ll be taking some more theory classes to become a better composer. I’m always on the lookout for some free time to spend on recording projects.

My dad is on the top 10 worst spammers list. In 1995 my dad the entrepreneur jumped from telecommunications into the Internet and started a hosting company. Since then he went from serving 1% of the world’s Internet traffic, to an innovative pre-IPO ecommerce company and various startups that didn’t make it, down to what is now a very small operation that focuses on providing services to “bulk emailers.”

This has made him currently the 3rd worst spammer in the world according to Spamhaus. He was 2nd worst for a while, and I’m not sure if he was ever at number 1, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Spamhaus should know better than to rank what the online game industry would call “griefers.” According to my dad, the organization is a bunch of extremists. My dad doesn’t see himself as a spammer, just a niche service provider.

I started a corporation when I was 17. Progrium Software was going to be a major player in the emerging massively multiplayer online game market. During the days of Dark Age of Camelot, Shadowbane, and The Sims Online, I was going to make what could be described as Grand Theft Auto Online. Underworld, as we called it, was going to be a gritty, realistic crime MMOG that would require several million dollars to develop.

I took the traditional startup approach, which was to get VC funding, as opposed to trying to hook a publisher to finance it. It turns out, VC is the way most MMOG companies have done it since then because of the massive amount of capital they require to make. The problem was that I didn’t have a track record, but I was able to put together an impressive business plan.

What I needed was a management team, so I started scouting for some marketing/sales and CFO types as well as executive producers and lead positions for the various departments. Using the business plan, the design document, and my enthusiasm, I was able to get some impressive people to let me put them on a “hypothetical management team” in the business plan.

Concurrently, we were trying to build a non-interactive demo to give a tangible glimpse at what the gameplay would be like. Then I was going to start playing the VC game, starting with an initial angel round, but it never got that far. The demo held us up, and after about a year of this up-hill pre-funding stuff, we decided to put it on the back burner for smaller game projects. Slowly I realized the impracticality of it and eventually took it out of the cards completely.

Since then I’ve tried to not start a company without a working product.

My legal name is Jeff Comer. Even though I associate my identity with and have whatever reputation as Jeff Lindsay, my name legally is Jeff Comer. That’s what is on my birth certificate and driver’s license.

The explanation is that my parents changed their last name from Comer to Lindsay around the time I was born, but I was still registered as Jeff Comer. They called me Jeff Lindsay though, so naturally that’s what I believed my name to be. Actually, for some reason my last name in school computers was Comer-Lindsay, so that’s what I thought my “official” last name was until I found out otherwise.

To me, my real name is Jeff Lindsay. I’ve come close to changing it legally, but it’s a bit of a chore to do that. I also sort of like the eccentricity of the situation.

Now we wait to hear from: Adam, Joel, Tom, and Mike

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 7:27 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.