Drake Martinet
This is awkward. This whole site is about me, and its still hard to get something down here that doesn’t make me cringe.
The shortest version I can muster is this:
I grew up the nephew, son, grandson, and great-grandson of women and men who either made things with their hands or educated others for a living—really most did both. I spent long hours taking things apart in the garage. Then switched to making websites, then college, more websites, then to writing remarks and speeches—I got to write for a few people I’m really proud of, and I even felt the lighting once or twice.
I took a break, then went a little crazy. One time I lived in 12 cities in 10 years.
I went to Stanford for a Masters Degree, because I worked really really hard and then a lady named Ann opened a door that changed my life. I ended up taking almost as many classes in software, hardware, and design as I did in Journalism. While still a student there, a friend and I built The Peninsula Press, which operates to this day.
After Stanford I became a journalist at The New York Times…just long enough to meet some lifelong friends, and my wife. Then I wrote about the near future of technology at a publication that used to be called AllThingsD, where I worked for a lady named Kara, from whom I learned many things—most of them unexpectedly. During this period I moonlighted teaching at Stanford in the D.School, the Comms department, and the GSB once or twice. Almost always I was teaching “non-technical” people how to make internet with their own two hands.
There are moments of magic when people create something that before was just confusing and purely abstract. Then they refresh their browser on the real-live internet like they have ten thousand times before, but this time they see that their change worked. For a moment they feel like wizards; I’m very proud some of them got hooked.
While at ATD, I got asked by Twitter to help them invent the first embeddable tweet. Mostly, Twitter badly wanted journalists to stop screenshotting tweets and getting the image proportions wrong—but JavaScript was finally pervasive, and the people Twitter put on that project saw that SO much more was possible. Working with them, on that perfect crossover product… something finally clicked for me. I realized what I had been drunkenly marching toward this whole time—I needed a job making technology to help fact-based truth keep winning the war of ideas.
I co-founded a startup called NowThis News working for some guys named Kenny and Eric, and alongside what became the best new-visual-media alumni association of that era. NowThis was FULL of crazy talented folks, and just a little ahead of its time. Then I got hired by a guy named Sterling and his boss Shane to launch something that would be called VICE News. We grew super fast, won our first Peabody, launched a TV channel, and I spent a few exhausting, fun, and insane (there’s gotta be a German word for this) years dong never-before-existed jobs, eventually becoming VICE Media’s Chief Product Officer and global head technology executive. I took their tech team from 8 to 80 while VICE went from 200 to 2000. I got to be there for the best part of a company’s rollercoaster ride—which is weirdly the climb up the biggest hill.
Life, love, and liberty called me back to my native California. After almost 2 years consulting alongside friends under my own shingle, I was lucky to be invited to join what I think is the words most prestigious technology publication—MIT Technology Review, which had begun it’s biggest transformation in a generation. I’m nothing if not a catalyst for change (and a bit of a talker), and the good folks at TR didn’t seem to mind either. Today I lead all internal and eternal technology efforts at the company as CTO. We are scrappy and we are mighty—and I’m deeply proud of the work we’re doing.
If there’s something I can help with…