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Technical Entrepreneur Profile 
Henri Poole, Affero CEO, bridges worlds between technology and business "Fantasy helps me position my mind so that it can solve problems in another context. I've always been fascinated by puzzles, and the trick to solving a puzzle is often dropping the baggage of the obvious. With fantasy, it simplifies the process of dropping your reality to move into another one. Inside a fantasy, you can see certain patterns emerge that might otherwise elude your perceptions."
Henri Poole Currently: CEO of Affero Entrepreneurial: Spatial Data Architects (SDA), Inc. (merged with vivid Studios in 1993) vivid Studios, Inc. (sold to Platinum Technologies in 1998) Affero, Inc. Heroes: "Since reading his article in Wired, "Why the future doesn't need us," a few years ago, Bill Joy has been a hero of mine. He's asking people to think about ethics and our own role in the world we are creating."
The son of an American private investigator and an Austrian philosopher, Henri Poole has been an artist, technologist, and entrepreneur since the age of sixteen. Poole's first company built multimedia solutions for clients like Apple Computer. As co-founder and CEO of his second company, vivid Studios, Poole led the firm to become one of The Net magazine's "10 Hottest Web Designers & Design Houses" in 1996, the heyday of Multimedia Gulch. After vivid's sale in 1998, Poole became CEO of Paris-based Linux distributor MandrakeSoft. During his short time at Mandrake he came up with the idea for his new venture, Affero, a company whose product provides a system of reputation measurement for the Internet. In addition to his CEO role at Affero, Poole is currently on the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation and is advising the Dennis Kucinich for President campaign on technology. He is also working with Catherine Austin Fitts on the technical side of the Solari project, an effort that intends to transform local economies. The Basic Challenge: People Aren't LogicalHave you ever found yourself sitting in a meeting with non-technical people, compelled to blurt out, "But that is illogical," like Star Trek's Dr. Spock? Henri Poole can relate. He says that when he was starting out in business, "It was uncomfortable for me to really let go of logic and start to understand the emotional and the unspoken needs of a customer but it was easier than trying to convince a customer that they just needed to buy my project no matter what it was." As Poole grew his business he learned to become more empathetic, "putting myself in my customer's place, asking myself, 'What is it like to be you? If I were you what would I want out of a tech solution?'" The effort to bridge the technical and business worlds requires some creativity. "I knew a programmer who took a class for beginning stand up comedians," says Poole. "Anything that breaks down the fears that trap us are great." For example, project managers at vivid would first work in all the different functions they managed. He recommends that budding entrepreneurs do a similar exercise to innovate solutions for clients. For example, "if you know databases, and you get in the grind of someone that really needs a good database solution, then you can innovate the best solution for them." Online Communities Create Comfort and Confidence"In today's world you really need to collaborate," say Poole. "I see a lot of people getting positive feedback from the Free Software Project community. There is a feeling of teamwork, of competition, and of success. People cheer you when you do something successful." "Today people can find a certain comfort and confidence in online communities," says Poole. "There is so much more abstraction and uncertainty and interdependencies - it used to be that you could escape into a machine and understand one world and be successful, but now you have to be social in order to be successful, you have to rely on others, you have to use the collective knowledge," says Poole. Losing Fluency, Gaining FluencyAs his business grew, Poole reluctantly decided to give up his fluency in the language of machines. "It takes a lot of time and energy to become fluent in the language of either a market or a set of machines," he says. "Both of those arenas have fragmented so much-you've got so many more niche markets these days, and so many more machines and types of machines to control those markets, and all the languages on top of it all. As the number of languages increased the ability to stay fluent in all of them decreased, so when I couldn't deliver a technical solution I found other people who could. I chose to bridge those worlds rather than immerse myself in the technology so I could deliver. So of course I lost my fluency in emerging languages." Poole surmises that his ability to bridge these worlds was at least partially due to his upbringing. "My mother was from Austria and my father was American and they communicated even though they came from different cultures. I've noticed that people talented with software are also talented with music. Being able to get in another world is important. That was what was so appealing for me with the machine in the first place." Poole may soon return to that world. He says that "after working for years and years with people, I've yet to find the comfort that I found with the machine in my youth. Perhaps I never will."
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