The Dynamic Doppelganger

There’s an old bit from Woody Allen’s standup act in which he recalls once having coped with a life-threatening situation by drifting into happy memories of his idyllic youth. He languorously ticks off the images that had filled his mind—“swimmin’ in the swimmin’ hole,” “buyin’ a piece of gingham for Emmylou,” “fryin’ up a mess o’ catfish.” There’s a pause that serves as a sighing tribute to those gauzy days of yore. Then he abruptly exclaims, “Suddenly I realize it’s not my life! I’m about to die, and the wrong life is flashing before my eyes!”

That ‘s sort of how I felt when I Googled myself the other day. I typed “Eric Ries” into the search engine and quickly discovered that Eric Ries is not, after all, “The Ungooglable Man”—the guy of no technological smarts and zero social-networking presence—with whom I’m so well acquainted.

Quite to the contrary, it develops that Eric Ries just about owns the Internet. He’s a hotshot entrepreneur and digital savant in California’s Silicon Valley whose how-to blog about technology startups, Lessons Learned, boasts nearly 60,000 subscribers and is quoted or cited seemingly a billion times across the Web. He has founded or co-founded at least three tech firms—included something called IMVU that Wikipedia describes as a “a 11 + 3D graphical instant messaging client” that hosts 90 million-plus users. He is credited with popularizing for Web applications something called the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. That’s described by Wikipedia as a strategy used in product development “for fast and quantitative testing of a product or product feature.” He’s written books with names like The Black Art of Java Game Programming. Needless to say, he’s got a Twitter account that no doubt is breathlessly followed by hundreds if not thousands of acolytes. He has given talks all over the world, many of which can be viewed on YouTube.

I could go on, but, frankly, in typing the preceding paragraph I strained my jargon limit and nearly bored myself to death. Suffice it to say, the Eric Ries whose words you’re reading right now scarcely could have less in common with the Eric Ries who BusinessWeek named one its “Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech” in 2007.

As if his professional history isn’t enough to distinguish us as polar opposites, consider the very first line of California Eric’s debut blog post, from October 4, 2008: “I’m one of those people who’s been programming since they can remember. I got my start programming on an old IBM XT: It was thanks to MUDs that I first discovered the Internet.”

OK, just one question from me. That question would be: WTF?!

The only part of the italicized lines above to which I can relate is the lifelong relationship to programming. Except that in my case, it would TV programming. I can’t really remember an age when I wasn’t glued to the set, starting with black-and-white fare in the early 1960s. In my case, it was thanks to muds that I first discovered the back of my mom’s hand—I’d tracked some into the house from the backyard.

Sure, with a little more searching I could have gotten the skinny on the “old IBM XT.” (Which I’m guessing is nevertheless newer than some of my underwear. And yes, I really do need to hit Sears soon.) And I know that the mystery of the acronym “MUD,” similarly, lies just a few mouse clicks away. But the point is, there’s a reason California Eric's (let's call him Cal-E henceforth, like he’s from Krypton) blog is called Lessons Learned and explores innovation, proactivity and profit margins, while my blog is called Lassitude Come Home and more often than not is about how I wish things would slow the hell down and people like the Cal-E would stop hastening the death of newspapers, CDs, land-line phones, commercial radio, and all sorts of other staples I hold dear.

In case you’re wondering, I did watch and hear Cal-E in action in some of those YouTube clips. I would’ve attached a photo of him to this post, or the link to a video clip, except that I honestly don't now how to do either thing and am not much interested in learning. Which kind of hammers home the fact that the other Eric and I are very far indeed from being identical twins.

To that point, physically we’re both white, male, bespectacled and fairly lean, but he’s got short black hair, a somewhat more prominent nose than I, and a confident air that perfectly suits his PowerPoint presentations. As you might have guessed, of the two of us, he’s the one with a right hand to match his left. His voice is a little nerdy but otherwise unremarkable. And of course he’s considerably younger than me. How much so, I don’t know, but those BusinessWeek awards go to entrepreneurs who are under 25. Which means he’s 27, tops. I’ve got a quarter-century on him.

I might have shared with you here some of Cal-E’s key business ideas and theories, but I couldn’t watch more than a minute or two of any of the video clips. They all involve techie stuff (go figure) and are deathly dull to my ears. Standup without the comedy.

What would genuinely have interested me would’ve been some personal data on my namesake—the city he lives in, whether he’s married and/or has kids, if he pursues any hobbies that don’t involve high-tech gadgetry. (I somehow imagine he skydives or rappels, in keeping with the I’m-like-a-shark-and-must-always-move-forward stereotype I have of his ilk.) But search as I might, I found no such tidbits. Being Cal-E’s East-Coast, lassitudinous opposite, I lacked the skills and doggedness to ferret out all available databases until I found the answers I was seeking. In short—and notably unlike the Cal-E of my imagining—I conceded defeat and gave up.

Per my use of the word in the above paragraph, I freely concede that I’m completely stereotyping Cal-E, based on my preconceptions, prejudices, preferences and, above all, my desire to justify through humor and irony my own non-striving, lazy-ass existence. Cal-E may, in fact, be a great guy who in countless ways is making the world a better place. This seemingly doomed planet of ours surely needs innovation and know-how of the type Cal-E presumably can deliver much more than it does my offerings of humor and irony, which seem vastly unlikely to birth the great green technologies of the future. I assume Cal-E has plenty of family members and friends who love him, and have many compelling reasons for doing so.

Don’t get me wrong—I really do take a certain pride in being The Ungooglable Man. In my own crotchety way, the designation bespeaks refusal to engage in a bunch of (dad-gum) nonsense. Still, it was a little deflating the other day to scroll through screen after screen of “Eric Ries” listings on Google before finally encountering myself—way, way down at link 359. There, I appeared in an index of articles that had been published in my then-employer’s magazine in 1999. And even that mention proved isolated. I hadn’t reappeared through search result 400, when I ceased looking.

I know, I know: I can’t very well have it both ways. It’s unreasonable to both revel in and be annoyed by one’s electronic anonymity. Yet I suffer this duality. Well, I’m not so much upset about my own virtual nonexistence on the Web as I am steamed at Cal-E for so completely hogging our name. It smacks of market domination to me.

Which, come to think of it, probably is one of the strategic goals Eric the Tech Wiz regularly teaches and blogs about. Damn.