Where did your journey start? You went through quite a few places before you got here.

My journey in the game industry started... I was living in Austin and I was managing a retail store that specialized in outdoor gear and travel and sort of exciting stuff like that. My roommate was one of my lifelong friends, who is also a CIG employee now. His name is Paul Vaden. He's in our Corp Tech department with Mike, and he's a critical member of our team. But anyway, Paul and I have been friends since we were in almost kindergarten. We have birthday party pictures together from when we were kids and stuff. To make a long story short, he worked at Origin Systems in Austin and was working on an early version of Ultima Online. And we were talking one day at the apartment, and he was telling me... I guess it started before that, because I would go hang out there at Origin with the guys and play Quake on the LAN because they had a great connection and stuff. And so at some point, I was probably spending too much time up there after hours playing games and goofing off. And they sort of said, well, hey, we have an open position working on Ultima Online. And I sort of said, well, what's that? And they gave me a beta key, and I went home and I just played the beta version of UO nonstop for a few days. And I said, well, yeah, sign me up. So I went through an interview and got a job as a game master on the beta version of Ultima Online. And that was the start of it, really: working at Origin, getting to know the team. I was particularly fascinated with online games as a vehicle for connecting people. These were the really early days of what started to become massively multiplayer online games. There's a long history before this, starting with MUDs and bulletin board games, and I'd played those games since I was a little kid, early MUDs and stuff like that. That was really cool. And so I ended up working at Origin and Electronic Arts for a few years and advanced my career internally. It was sort of funny, because one of the things that was attractive to me about going to work there was that I felt like I had a lot of responsibility when I was managing this store, and I felt like I'd have less responsibility just basically being a customer service person. And in about six months I was managing the department again and had a lot of responsibility, and sometimes wished I was back at the store, to be fair. But fast forward, I left there in 2001 to work with Richard Garriott and a small team to start a new company called Destination Games. And pretty soon after we started that company, we actually joined forces with NCSoft and became NCSoft's Western division, brilliantly called NCSoft West. And we built a publishing organization for NCSoft to service their rest-of-the-world venues. And I ended up staying with that project for nine years and left with Richard and a small team to form a company called Portalarium. And we focused on social and mobile games, and we had built some really, really cool tech, but never really had a product that hit the market super strongly. And so in 2012 we had been talking with Chris about some of his ideas about getting back into the game industry, and ultimately, when he launched the initial crowdfunding campaign at the Game Developers Conference in Austin in 2012, he was hanging out in our office space in downtown Austin and using that as kind of a base of operations. And so we sort of chatted a little bit about some of his ideas and what he wanted to do with Star Citizen and the crowdfunding campaign. And a few months later, I was working with Chris instead of Richard. And here I am. It's been about 11 years since then, and we've come a long way since those early days. Who would have thought, right? To be honest, and I don't want to make too big of a thing out of it, but I remember I worked with this guy as a game master in the very beginning, and he sort of had this attitude of, this is stupid, we're doing grunt work, if they fix these bugs, you wouldn't need us, and whatever. And I distinctly remember having this conversation with him and saying, this is the future of video games that we're doing here today. This is really going to mean something, and you should take it seriously. And so I sort of had that attitude from the beginning of, this is really where this is going. And I think it's interesting to think about the aspects of those early games that we thought were really revolutionary. We had stories of people who had military family members that were deployed, and they would use Ultima Online as a way to talk to one another after hours and stuff. Now we take that for granted as a super mainstream activity. 20 years ago, that was kind of fringe. And so I think a lot of the things that we consider mainstream today, social networking and all this kind of stuff, really have their roots in these kinds of games. So I thought that was exciting, even when I was first getting into the game. Not that I've got perfect future vision, but I was at least smart enough to realize this is really meaningful when it comes to how people interact virtually, and it's going to mean something in the future.