Personal Stuff...

Here's a bunch of stuff about me, including a photo of me.

I was born in Colombia and grew up in the US. I was into sciences in high school, where I won the state science fair. In the late 70s, I lived seven years in Germany, where I studied Hegel & Heidegger at the Universität Heidelberg. A year in Paris and Aix-en-Provence and seven more years in Århus, Denmark, where I worked on a doctorate for a while, married a Dane for a while, and had a computer company for a while.

After living everywhere, I speak a bunch of languages. If you like words, here are Some of My Favorite Words.

I was in Berlin the night the Berlin Wall fell. I wrote a long letter to my mom. There's plenty of photos of the Berlin Wall, but no one else wrote an account of what actually happened that night. My letter ended up being published in a number of history books and has become part of historical archives. In 1999, as part of the tenth anniversary, I was interviewed on nationwide radio for an hour. When that statue of Saddam was pulled down in Iraq, the BBC called up and we talked for another 15 minutes.

I got burnt out by all the big money in philosophy, so I came to Silicon Valley in the early 90s, where I worked at more than 25 startup projects and Silicon Valley companies, incl. SUN, SGI, and Brio.

In the mid-90s, I got married again for a while. Here's a bit about Susan.

I also do a bit of web stuff. I wrote one of the first books on web design. I've built or managed the websites for a bunch of SV startups. I was the webmaster for a site that grew to 16 million registered users and 60 million hits per day. It's very likely you used it. The dotcom burnt $70 million in VC funding and cratered. Yeah, I worked for a Silicon Valley dotcom and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

In 2001, after SV and the web crashed, I held a funeral for the web. We buried the web next to my Palo Alto garage. We put the Pets.com sockpuppet into a Webvan box, along with a bunch of AOL CDs, Netscape mouse pads, and all sorts of logo stuff from dotcoms. I invited Bill Gates, Marc Andreeasen, Jim Clark, and others and we held services. It kinda got out of hand. Four magazines and several newspapers covered the funeral and a bunch of people visited my website... oh, some 15,000 per hour for a few days. In July 2002, another company bought the rights to the Pets.com spokespuppet and relaunched his career, so more press showed up.


I was the national chair guy of the NWU Tech Writers Trade Division from 1994 to 2004. I talked with lots of recruiters, managers, directors, CEOs, and so on, so there's quite a bit on this website about how to find work in SV. As part of this, I also rewrote the overtime law in California.

When I travel, I often write about it for my friends. Here's my trip to Europe and Bangalore.

In early 2000, I started working with Stephanie Cota's company CCG. We build and manage ecommerce, SEO, and PPC.

We also wrote Insider SEO & PPC (2nd edition, May 2006), a book on SEO and PPC. It's at Amazon, Borders, and so on.

In 2005, a group of investors offered VC funding and we co-founded a larger company. In early 2006, we bought a 35-person company in India. We grew it to +55 staff employees. In late 2007, I left to start other projects. I'm now an advisor to the company. Visit the company at


For fun, I manage a listserv for philosophy and literature. People around the world use it to talk about books, ideas, and stuff. This is fine for me; I read quite a bit. Actually, I read more than I do web stuff. Mostly Anthony Trollope, modernist fiction, and so on. I've read quite a bit from everywhere: Roman and Greek, ancient Chinese, both classical and modern Japanese novels, African literature, South American, India, and so on. I have well over 4,000 books. I've also written a few books.


I also have this website andreas.com. I registered it back in '95, when there were only a handful of websites, and you sent a email to a kid named Jerry who lived in a dorm room so you could be listed on his website, which he named Yahoo, just for fun (and it's actually an acronym for something.) A bunch of us were using fido.net and UseNet since the 80s. The web was cool because one could add pictures to it, tho' in the beginning, it was mostly cat pictures. Like a bug collection, my site grew and grew and grew... it's now over 500 pages with some 50,000 unique monthly visitors. Many of my FAQs are #1 for their topic. My article on Hokusai ranks higher than the Wikipedia entry or the Hokusai Museum in Japan. A few years ago, I started a more-or-less monthly newsletter, to let people know about new pages, and that's grown to five thousand readers all over the world. If you search Google for andreas, my site is at the top.

In 1998, I bought a house in Palo Alto and renovated it. I pulled out all the wiring and rewired it. Later, I replaced all the plumbing. I also rebuilt the kitchen and fireplace. I really did all this stuff. Many people say they built a fireplace, when really they hired a carpenter to do it. I rented a large stone cutter, bought several hundred pounds of slate from India, set up a workshop in the backyard, cut the stone myself, and built the whole thing. I also replaced all the windows with double-paned glass and built several doors. There's a great backyard where I can set up my telescope and see planets and stuff. I have software that tells me when to look for satellites. The space station goes by every once in a while.

Since I work all day on computers, I'm low-tech at home, not even a TV. A few years ago, I bought a bunch of cedar planks and built a 1,000 gallon hot tub in the sideyard. I added an industrial gas heater to keep it at 104°, even during winter storms. People ask me, so what do you do when it's raining? Wear a rain hat.

I live with my cat Eurydice, who is a great mouser. She hunts mice in the backyard. I take the lizards away from her and put them back on the woodpile.

For Y2K, I hosted a huge millennial party at my house in Palo Alto. The party's over, but the invitation is still here...

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