About Sean Patrick Coon

I’d been studying how things work my whole life. My parents were both gifted educators with advanced degrees from Columbia, and both carried pain from their own childhoods. My father was an alcoholic; my mother was a workaholic. Like a lot of Gen X kids, I was left to my own devices, and by seven I was taking care of myself. In a house like that, it pays to know who’s in what mood, what isn’t being said, and what will happen next. I learned to read rooms and to stay steady when things got tense. Drawing was what I wanted to do whenever I wasn’t playing video games or basketball, and where I could set all of that down. Pen and ink kept me on the line in front of me instead of everything bigger.

At seventeen, I took a portfolio of those drawings to Manhattan to interview with Murray Tinkelman, who taught illustration at Syracuse. He looked like he’d stepped out of a comic book, leather and all, and he asked me what I was trying to say with each piece. No one that accomplished had ever looked that closely at my work, and he was the first man I remember not seeing as a threat.

Ron DeVito, my best friend’s father and a creative director at Bozell in Manhattan, had made himself available to me since high school. In college, during a recession, I started worrying about how I’d support myself, and his advice finally landed. I switched to advertising design, fell for critique, and started solving communication problems for clients and their audiences instead of only expressing myself.

Around the same time, I took an elective in contemporary literary theory with Bill Readings. I was a studio artist learning to communicate through advertising, and I wanted to understand how language does its work. I had no idea the class would change my life. Bill was a Brit, brilliant and funny, an activist teacher who cared about his students, and he opened my mind to deconstruction, linguistics, and semiotics. He died in a plane crash during my senior year, the first person I’d come to trust and admire who died.

I carried both, communication design and the language underneath it, into my first jobs designing CD-ROM games: level design, branching dialogue, linear scripts turned into paths where what happens next depends on the player. It was the first work that made me think non-linearly. I still do, with software and AI agents in place of players. That’s the thinking I brought to Janis’s question.

Organic is where I found the kind of people I’ve looked for ever since: talented, highly competent, with strong points of view and a respect for mine. Robert Fabricant, the chief information architect, took a multimedia designer who was still finding his footing and made him an information architect in a year. He gave me room to fail, and feedback good enough that I rarely did. I met Fanny Krivoy there too, the brand mind behind Eyeweb. Since then, I’ve worked for her, partnered with her when we each ran our own studios, and brought her in to shape the brands at 98point6 and PrescriberPoint. Decades later, I still talk with her every month, and with Janis every couple of weeks.

At Tripod, I met Robert Egert, a brilliant, deeply creative leader who saw something in me I hadn’t seen yet: someone who could run things, not just design them. When he took over creative at Xpedior, he brought me with him to run information architecture across its offices. He was generous and fair, and on long hikes he talked about trading the chase for peace. It took me a long time to hear it.

Datek, and then Ameritrade, is where design stopped being the product. At Organic and Xpedior, it was part of what we sold. Datek was a financial firm that spoke the language of money, and it came to value design once design delivered wins that opened up new ways to make it. First, though, I had to earn their respect and learn that language, the first of many I’d learn to speak. When the engineering leaders I reported to stopped showing up for design, Lawrence Szczech, who ran strategy, did. When Ameritrade bought Datek and many people left, I stayed, pitched a new trading platform, and built the company’s first real design organization.

When I left New York for Greensboro, North Carolina, I founded dotmatrix studios, a user experience consultancy, with clients like Scripps Networks. Outside that work, I was an outsider to the city’s music underground, with no title, no money to pay anyone, and no standing, and I wanted to help record it. So I went to the shows and the house parties and earned trust one person at a time. It became the dotmatrix project: dozens of free shows, recorded and filmed by volunteers. Nobody had to be there, and people kept coming back.

Back in-house in Seattle, after a decade on my own, Robbie Schwietzer, my COO at Medbridge and then my CPO at 98point6, brought what I’d never studied: the business. He could find the one wrong number in a plan and see around corners, and he pushed back when I pushed hard. Working with him, I stopped treating the business as someone else’s problem.

My marriage ended during those years at 98point6, and the divorce made me look at patterns I’d carried into every part of my life, including my work. The steadiness I built as a kid fit a small, familiar world. It didn’t stretch to fit a bigger one, so I held myself together by holding everything in, and I pushed the people around me to show up the way I needed them to. The ones who engaged became friends for decades. With too many others, I collided. So I did the work to understand where I came from, and how it shapes the way I show up.

For almost three years now, I’ve been working with Anne Weiler, an executive coach who has led at Amazon and Microsoft and built and sold her own company, Wellpepper. She asks hard questions and keeps me grounded, and with her I’m learning to ease off the urge to deliver at all costs.

Murray asked what I was trying to say. Janis asked how I think about design. Anne asks how I’m showing up. I’d still answer Janis the same way, but the question has grown. Understanding how things work used to be the point. Now it’s where I start: making things that work well for the people who use them, and working well with the people who make them. I still look for people with strong points of view who respect mine; these days, I try to be one of them for the people I lead.

That’s what I’m bringing to Knowing, where I’m building smart products that help small business owners grow.

And if you’re building something with people who care as much about how they work together as about what they make, I’d like to hear about it, whether that leads to advising, consulting, or the right role on the right team, in tech or alongside it. Arrange a coffee or send me a note.