Alex Halliday, Principal Product Manager at MasterClass, built his first website at 16, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan site that turned into a revenue-generating business managing dozens of sites. He credits the LGBT community in San Francisco with welcoming him into tech and argues that embracing your authentic self, not conforming, is what drives real innovation.
Chapters
My name is Alex Halliday. I am a Principal Product Manager at masterclass.com, website which lets people get access to the greatest minds in the world. Tech was very much my kind of go-to hobby from a very young age. I remember building computers at school and taking apart my parents' computer and them being very upset with me. I was drawn to tech because it allowed me to jump ahead in life. I was 16 years old and I wanted to create something and put it out into the world. And if you're consuming a product on the other end of the internet, you don't care how old the person that made it is. My first real-world project was, I think, like a Buffy the Vampire Slayer website back in the day. And so I started building fan sites when I was 16, and that was my entryway into a career in tech. My hobby in tech turned into a revenue-generating career at the age of 16, which was incredibly fun. Being at school and having 30 websites at one point, me and my friend, and we would sell advertising off the back of those. So it was really from hobby to sort of side business into actually working with others and taking on clients and building out projects for other people. There is the additional dimension of the gay community in tech, which I've found to be extremely strong. When you're moving into a new industry or moving to a new city, being part of a smaller community especially one that's as welcoming as the LGBT community, is massively impactful in a professional setting. I think when I moved to San Francisco and was able to be connected with people who realized that I was new and didn't know many people was amazing for me. I moved with a co-founder who was straight, and I found it a lot easier to make friends because I was able to step into a very welcoming social network. I think in tech it's really important to understand your own superpowers. Tech relies on people with different opinions to come in with different perspectives, different experiences, to really create things that have never really existed before. People's unique life experience, for example, can be a massive asset in creating the future. And so I think resisting the temptation to fit in and conform to what the group thinks is actually hugely powerful in discovering things that weren't obvious and therefore haven't been done before.
If you've got it, own it. Exactly. Introducing the first-ever Lexus UX. Crafted to make every new journey fabulous. Experience amazing at your Lexus dealer.
