FAVORITE MEMORIES OF WILLIAMS

Andrew Crider, John Eusden, Whitney Stoddard, Lane Faison, Richard Rouse, George Goethals, Conrad van Ouwerkerk. Winter Study and Winter Carnival. Countless hours of Roof Ball at Tyler House.

CURRENT INTERESTS, PASSIONS, AND ORGANIZATIONS

Advocates for Prevention of Domestic Violence, St. Luke’s Hospital, Little Sisters of Nepal. Still endeavoring to truly understand Zen Buddhism after taking a Winter Study from John Eusden. For that matter, I’m also still trying to wrap my brain around Mircea Eliade’s Cosmos and History.

LIFE SINCE GRADUATION

I grew up on the East Coast, but having traveled to the western U.S. numerous times during my childhood, I knew that one day I would become a “westerner.” After Williams I remained in New England for four years—two years working and two more attending Harvard B-school (once again rooming with the inimitable Steve Barger). The last year that I was in New England I met my wife, Lisa, in Hanover, N.H., where she was on a Dartmouth exchange program from UCLA and I was working as a research fellow at the Tuck Graduate School at Dartmouth. In 1976 she returned to finish UCLA as I moved to San Francisco, and we have lived in the West ever since. A few years later we were married and moved to Palo Alto when Lisa began grad school at Stanford.

My years in the Bay Area were spent working in venture capital and running technology start-ups, almost all of which were in the medical and biotechnology fields. We had two sons, born in 1987 and 1990. As our boys entered their school-age years, we felt a yearning to try a different lifestyle from the one we were living in Silicon Valley. So we moved to Sun Valley, Idaho, where I had worked for a couple of summers during graduate school. What was originally intended to be a one- or two-year break from California lasted a bit longer than we expected. In fact, we just passed 26 years since moving from Palo Alto to Sun Valley, although during the first 10 years I commuted back to the Bay Area when I was CEO of a biotech company based in Berkeley. Following those 10 years, I was able to work remotely but with considerable travel.

More recently our older son, Reed, decided not to remain the Bay Area once he finished at Stanford B-school, so he and his wife embarked on a year-long tour of some smaller cities to try out. They were fortunate enough to have jobs that allowed them to work remotely. But Covid hit during this tour of cities, so they asked if they, and their two young children, could stay with us to form a “Covid pod.” So we all hunkered down together for eight months. Much to their surprise, and our great delight, they decided to settle here in Sun Valley. It was one of the positive outcomes of Covid. Our other son, Cody, is working in NYC and LA for the marketing/branding firm Ogilvy.

Lisa and I have been married for 41 years. The two of us are very involved in the community and sit on a number of boards of directors of both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Given that we live in a recreational paradise, we’ve continued to do biking, trail running, hiking, and Nordic skate skiing. All in all, we feel extraordinarily blessed and grateful for our lives.