The Wheel o’ Time landed on September 16, 2011, and for once it dropped me on a day I recognized immediately, or at least I recognized the name attached to it: HIVE11, the first AIGA Seattle HIVE conference, held out at Microsoft in Redmond. I remembered that it was fun. I remembered that Zug and I were there as Bootstrapper, which was still barely a company at that point, and that the room was full of designers and developers and other people saying interesting things instead of whatever normally comes out of a ballroom microphone. What I did not remember was nearly everything else, which is why this project exists. The archive had to hand the day back to me one photograph, tweet, invoice, and half-remembered conversation at a time, and even now I’m not always sure which parts are my memory and which parts have been jogged loose by watching the surviving video. So take this as archaeology, not omniscience.

The story of September 16 actually starts the afternoon before, because live events begin long before anybody opens the doors and starts pretending the whole thing just sprang into existence. At 1:49 on September 15 I posted the extremely 2011 photograph above; filtered, square, aggressively yellow coffee mug, with a pastry. I said I was getting coffee before setting up for HIVE11 at Kitanda Brazilian Coffee. A few hours later the next picture shows the room coming together: road cases, cables, laptops, a multiview monitor, a camera on sticks, and Zug sitting at the production position. Jenny Lam had given us access from 2:30 to 6:00 because, especially when streaming, we wanted hours to build and test everything. By 4:50 I was already bragging that we were all set up, which is one of those tiny statements that becomes much funnier after you spend years in live production discovering all the ways “all set up” can still turn into “where the fuck did the audio go?”

This was super early Bootstrapper, one of the first major events we can currently recover, and the gear is a perfect little fossil of where we were. We were not rolling in with giant broadcast cameras. We were using small point-and-shoot video cameras with HDMI outputs, the kind of hand cameras that looked almost silly compared with the production they were being asked to create. I was running one of those cameras, close to the stage as best I can reconstruct it, and Zug was back at the switcher. Later I moved toward switching, but when it was just the two of us the early grammar was Zug switching and producing while I ran camera. The nicest piece of gear we had (the thing that made this suddenly feel possible) was a brand-new ATEM 1 M/E. These modest little cameras went into that box and somehow came out the other side as a live multicamera show with slides, graphics, streaming, and an edited program. Looking at the pile now, what I hear is not “look at our janky setup.” I hear, holy shit, we can do television.

^{Dinner with the HIVE11 crew at Tavolata after setup. The pic remembers more of the evening than I do.}

After setup came dinner with the HIVE crew at Tavolata, a long table full of place settings and glasses and people I was apparently beginning to know. This is where the external archive and the internal one stop agreeing. The photographs and emails can prove I was there, but I do not get a vivid scene back when I look at them, and I’m not going to stuff somebody else’s certainty into that hole.

^{September 16, 7:11 AM: “Dispersed so I can see.” I had woken before the sun, but it was catching up.}

The morning started before sunrise. At 6:37 I tweeted, “Woke up before the sun. But now it’s catching up to me. This is the best time of year in the NW.” Then came that odd, lovely picture of light scattered through a window screen, followed by the completely ordinary photographic chatter of 2011 me—Lightroom presets, workflow tips, a Canon point-and-shoot with a ridiculous zoom—and then, at 8:59, the picture that brings the whole job into focus. The multiview is glowing, the room beyond it is still mostly dark and empty, the laptop is open, the coffee is in position, and all of our camera feeds are alive a full minute before the scheduled sound check. I wrote, “Love being set up well in advance. All cameras on for @HIVE11.” That was literal production language, but it was also me punning on my little side project All Cameras On, which I had been wrapping up as Bootstrapper began becoming the real thing.

^{8:59 AM. Set up early, coffee ready, all cameras on.}

A few months earlier, in March, Zug and I had spent three days recording the Global Health Metrics & Evaluation Conference at the Westin Seattle. That was serious work by serious people—IHME, The Lancet, public-health researchers, dozens and dozens of sessions—and it was also a formative technical ordeal that eventually produced something like fifty-eight videos, so this is not me making fun of anybody in a white coat. But the contrast is too good to ignore. One of the sessions we had recorded was called “Next generation of health system performance metrics.” Six months later, one of our first major Bootstrapper events opened with loud rock music, an orange honeycomb animation, and Scott Berkun bounding out to talk about feedback without frustration. Same basic craft, completely different universe. HIVE was one of the first times I realized my new job could be recording cool people talking about fun shit, and I fucking loved it.

The weird memory thing happens with Scott Berkun. I knew Zug had known Scott before all this, and the archive informed me that Scott, Zug, and I had already sat down at Brouwer’s in June and kicked around an idea for a live show. I have no recollection of that lunch at all. What I do remember is Scott becoming one of those cool people I got to do a lot of shit with over the years: he was the MC for much of my time producing Ignite Seattle, he was one of the first CreativeMornings Seattle speakers, I worked with him and Zug a little on We Make Seattle, and he was simply always around wherever interesting things were happening. Finding his HIVE talk surprised me even though, according to the evidence, it probably shouldn’t have.

The day itself was full of the kind of noise that means I was both working and having a blast. I tweeted about the stream being full of great snippets, promised somebody we would post the videos soon, got distracted by how many designers had paid more than $300 for their glasses, suggested Warby Parker, and offered to accept payment in a monocle. Then Twitter mostly goes quiet for the afternoon, which is probably the most honest record of the work: I had a camera to operate. I remember being close to the stage, although I cannot cleanly separate the original memory from what the Scott video handed back to me when I watched it again. That distinction matters. Contemporary evidence says I was there running camera. Present-day memory supplies a physical fragment. The rest is an inference built from photographs, production emails, and the surviving program, and I would rather leave those seams visible than invent a beautifully lit memory that my brain did not actually keep.

The aftermath is where the random date starts sending roots everywhere. On Monday Jenny sent Zug an email with the subject “you are my hero,” thanked both of us, said we had made the production look easy, and said people had not fully realized the caliber of the talent in Zug’s team. Then she did something even better than praise us: she found additional AIGA budget and asked for a $1,000 A/V invoice, which she called an incredible bargain. There is no need to pretend that one job instantly made Bootstrapper a success, but when your company is only a couple of months old and the client finishes the event by finding money because she thinks the work deserved more, you remember why “Fuck You, Pay Me!”—the famous CreativeMornings talk Zug loved and I had watched more than once—felt less like a joke and more like an instruction manual for becoming a real creative business.

The next morning Ryan Anderson emailed me because he had seen what we did and wanted pricing for a monthly AIGA lecture series. “Ryan Anderson” means almost nothing to my brain, so let us call him Cowboy, because that is who he was. I had worked with Cowboy at Camp Tadmor many summers ago when I was 17, where everybody had camp names and mine was Animal. He had unexpectedly run into Animal at HIVE, discovered Animal had helped start a video company, watched the company pull off this multicamera livestream, and then asked what it would cost to reproduce “the full experience you saw at HIVE11.” That particular lead did not have the budget, but it is still a perfect little piece of evidence: before the weekend was over, somebody had watched Bootstrapper work and asked to buy the thing he had just seen.

Then there was David Conrad and CreativeMornings. My memory is that Zug and I met David at HIVE and he got us excited about starting the Seattle chapter. There is no smoking-gun email recording the conversation because it happened in person, which is annoying for archaeology and perfectly normal for life. What the documents do show is the wake behind it: four days after HIVE I was already writing Jenny about future collaboration “as Creative Mornings gets rolling here in Seattle,” and a month later Zug and I were actively preparing to shoot the first Seattle event. We were not strangers to the idea; we already knew CreativeMornings, especially “Fuck You, Pay Me!,” so when David came over and started talking about a Seattle chapter, we were already there with him. Much later, as I remember it, someone senior at POP saw what we were doing at a CreativeMornings event—whether speaking or simply attending, I do not know—carried that impression back toward Bill Predmore, and eventually another POP employee approached us about producing the first Seattle Reign game. I cannot prove every joint in that chain and I do not want to turn HIVE into Destiny Day, but the chain is worth preserving with the uncertainty attached.

That is what I like about this random Friday. September 16 Adam was not standing near the stage thinking, “Aha, today begins a network of relationships that will lead through CreativeMornings and into sports production.” He was thinking, if anything, that the speakers were interesting, the glasses were overpriced, the stream looked good, and this was a very fun way to make a living. The company was new. The cameras were cheap. The switcher felt like magic. Cowboy was still Cowboy, Scott was onstage and would keep turning up for years, David was about to help pull us into another community, and Jenny was about to tell us that we had made a difficult thing look easy. I do not remember the entire day. I remember the feeling, and the evidence agrees with it: Bootstrapper was becoming real, and I was exactly where I wanted to be.