My name is Brian Haven (my friends just call me Haven) and I'm a native Californian, born and raised. I grew up in Visalia, California and attended California State University, Fresno (Fresno State to the locals) where I studied business and marketing. I moved to San Francisco in 1996 to be a part of the dotcom era. I worked in Wells Fargo's online banking group just after they launched the first online banking website. Then I moved to the strategic development group. About a year later, one of WFBs strategic initiatives spun off into it's own company, InnoVentry. I was responsible for the customer experience of all the company's self-service financial services kiosks. After three years, in the summer of 2001 I left InnoVentry and took a year off (with stays in Alaska and San Diego) before moving to Pittsburgh, PA to attend Carnegie Mellon University's master's degree program in Interaction Design. Two years of study in design thinking and design strategy led me to a design research and strategist position at Catapult Thinking in Boston. After a little over a year, I moved to Forrester Research to become a senior analyst covering emerging channels (social media). I'm a resident of lovely Somerville, MA and my next move is yet to be determined...
So Pete tagged me with the "8 random things" meme. So many things about me are random it's hard to choose where to start. But here it goes:
1. One of my first words as a baby was "birdahonk" -- hence the name of by site. My family teased me about it for years. On my 15th birthday, my entire family played a recording of me saying it and they were all dying to know what it meant. Like I remembered. They're all crazy. But they kept teasing me so I decide to shut them all down by buying the domain name and making it my cyber-identity. The rest is history. (For what it's worth, we think its a reference to the days my dad used to hold me as a baby and I'd look out the window and see the geese flying over head, honking -- bird-a-honk!)
2. I'm told, although I cannot verify this, that my half sister's grandfather (on the side of the family I'm not related) invented the paper toilet seat cover. So the next time you're having a sanitary public restroom moment, you can think of me and my brush with fortune.
3. My dad, 50 years old when I was born, was a bombardier in WWII. Hey flew in the B-24 Liberator.
4. Every Saturday morning as a child, my little sister and I were interrupted at 9am so my mom could record Star Trek (the original series in syndication). What a drag on your Saturday cartoon watching.
5. I played the viola from the 5th to 9th grade (with a brief attempt at resurrection in college that didn't stick). I wasn't very good. However, I was a fairly decent tuba player in high school and college. I even majored in instrumental performance in college for about a year. Then I realized there was no money in that and I just focused on business (not sure there's much money in that either after my last raise). As part of my performance art-type experience, I was a member of the Santa Clara Vanguard Drum & Bugle Corps in 1992 and 1994. I played the contrabass bugle and the euphonium, respectively.
6. After the dotcom bust (c. 2001), I took a year off and spend an amazing time in Alaska (I camped out in a sleeping bag on the top deck of the ferry for the 3.5 day ride from Bellingham, WA to Juneau). Then I crashed with a buddy in San Diego and basically hiked every day and hung out at the beach. I also manage to get accepted to grad school during that time (go Tartans!).
7. I recently learned that I have a long lost brother.
8. While at college as an undergrad I was the editor of an underground newspaper that really rubbed the administration the wrong way.
I'll pass this along to some old buddies: