39: Learn by building (Ron Martinez interview)

Talking through my hat

Ron Martinez is the Founder and Principal of design and product-innovation firm Invention Arts, and also a prolific inventor with >60 US patents and many more worldwide in the fields of media, mobile and social technologies, and commerce. He's worked in Intellectual Property Innovation for Yahoo!, and enjoyed a long and successful career designing, producing, and coding consumer software products, including pioneering interactive fiction, entertainment and educational software, massively multiplayer games. And when he was younger, he wrote fiction, young adult pathway books, and comics.

In this episode, we talk about his journey from fisherman and writer to successful inventor and entrepreneur, via a brief flirtation with corporate life and even working with Arthur C. Clarke. He learned to program computers because he enjoyed writing unusual stories so much - so that he could create his own software to enable those stories. Now, he spends his time balancing "going deep" and "going broad", and he believes that "you are what you ship," as a business. That is, you are what you give the world.