Jeff Keen

Are you ready?

Hold on a second, are we rolling?

What do you do, exactly?

I’m a Designer/Developer, with a heavy bend on User Experience. I recently started my own company, Tempo Labs, where I do freelance design and development. That’s what I do for work, and it’s work that I really enjoy.

But I don’t like to do just one thing, and the whole reason I quit the salaried 9-5 game is so I’d have a more flexible schedule to pursue my other interests.

Like what?

Like creative writing, working on personal app ideas, and writing music. I’m still figuring out what I really want to do, ultimately, I just knew for sure that didn’t want to attach myself to someone else’s dream anymore. I’ve got my own dreams.

You’ve been called an idea guy, haven’t you?

Thank you for saying that, so I didn’t have to. Because I know! I know how douchey “I’m an idea guy” can sound—just a hair below “I’m a Thought Leader”, or “I’m a Creative”. But honestly, idea guy makes sense, because I come up with a lot of ideas. The quality of them: questionable and unverified. The category: all over the place. The execution of them: sometimes lacking. But the ideas! They’re real.

I’m happiest when I’m solving problems, day dreaming, and coming up with new ideas.

Towards the end of my tenure at my old company, Spiceworks, I started participating in meetings that weren’t directly related to my role—just to help come up with new ideas. And that was a pretty great setup, for me. But answer me this: how do I make a career out of that? Do I make business cards that say “Jeff Keen: idea guy”?

No, don’t do that.

I wasn’t going to. It was a rhetorical question.

Oh, ok.

Anyway, until I figure that out, I’ll continue to pause awkwardly when people ask me what I do, and then mumble something about user experience.

How might people know you?

If you’re in Austin, maybe you’ve seen me. I’m pretty tall, hang out in coffee shops in the day time, and I don’t blend into crowds well. And if you were in the Elephant Room on December 17th, 2012 and heard the thunderous boom after some guy got up from the bar and nailed his head on a low part of the basement ceiling—that was me! And if you were the bartender who gave me a free beer after I dried my tears in the bathroom, I meant to say thank you, but I’m pretty sure I was concussed.

Have you made anything people would know?

Oh, on the Internet? I’ve been writing to companies as a naive 40-something midwestern woman named Linda Wilson for a decade, so maybe you’ve seen one of those posts?

Or maybe you heard the song I made out of 48 voicemails my brother left me called I Know It’s You (Jeff, It’s Roger)? It got popular on reddit for a bit and was featured on a Metafilter podcast.

Or maybe you saw the chrome extension, Garlic, I made to help you keep away those time sucking websites?

Or if you’re a reddit regular, maybe you saw this error message that got to the front page of reddit a while back? Or maybe someone sent you to Should I Reply To All?? Or maybe you read this hard-hitting essay about texting and dating I wrote called Call Me Sometime? Or the satirical Missed Connection I wrote about a bird in Whole Foods?

Or years ago, I made this silly site called Beard Status that got popular for a week on Twitter. Maybe you heard of that?

Ok, that’s enough. Nobody knows you.

At least 3 people know me.

What’s this website all about? Just some sort of self-indulgent exploration?

I’m sort of going back to my roots with this website direction. I’m hoping this becomes a place where I post whatever silly or serious stuff I’ve made lately. The last time I did anything like this was when I did spiderpop.com back in 1999-2003. Since then, I tried to separate the different ideas into freestanding sites, and the little stuff that didn’t fit got dropped, and the stuff that wasn’t done never got shared. It’s still a little fragmented, but I’m really going to try to put everything I do here. So in that regard, it is a little self indulgent.

Why don’t you just post this on Facebook?

The epicenter of internet self-indulgence? Because Facebook has gotten seriously annoying lately, and I could talk your ear off about the different ways that social media (and Facebook in particular) is changing people’s behavior in a bad way. In short, me and Facebook need some couples counseling, because we’re on the road to an ugly divorce that might involve me figuratively throwing all of those thoughts on my figurative front lawn for all my figurative neighbors to see.

That metaphor was a stretch.

Is this interview over?

You put your phone number on your website. Are you crazy?

Maybe, but I thought this would be an interesting experiment. Communication has gotten so impersonal, lately. It seems like people would rather hide behind their screens and communicate through text than actually speaking to someone. And actually talking to someone is nice. Are we not all humans, still?

But anyway, it’s a dedicated Google Voice number, so if this turns out to be a horrible idea, there is some recourse.