Before Cameron Turner lived out his dream of being an architect, he thought he would spend a couple of years in product management at Microsoft. But like another recent guest, a couple years turned into many more. Ultimately, his interest in helping people solve their design and productivity challenges was put to use in myriad ways. Find out how creating new worlds is sometimes less about what you construct and more about how people feel at home in what you build.
Guest Cameron Turner had come to college with a full-sized drafting table and a dream to become an architect. He had to build his own academic program, augmenting his studio art major with an engineering minor and internship experiences at a variety of architecture firms. Going through corporate recruiting, he got an opportunity to work at Microsoft and figured it would be an experience for a couple years. The company sought his design skills, however, to help make its productivity products more robust and elegant and put him on a path within product management and user experience design and those couple of years proved to be longer than he expected.
After and MBA and a masters in statistics, he applied his skills toward his own businesses and pivoted toward the world of big data and AI. But his desire to remain close to the customer and approach their challenges with a design lens hasn’t changed from his days of dreaming of architecture.
In this episode, find out from Cameron how creating new worlds is sometimes less about what you construct and more about how people feel at home in what you build…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Cameron Turner is Vice President of Data Science for Kin + Carta, who acquired Datorium, one of the companies he founded. He is an executive data science leader, applied AI specialist, and serial entrepreneur with a track record of digital transformation and build out of new data-driven businesses. He and his family continue to soak in the sunshine in Palo Alto. (246)
For another story about making a career at Microsoft after thinking it would last only two years, listen to our epsiode with Keshav Puttaswamy.
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Cameron Turner: The idea of what you have of a profession and what it actually is in day to day, practice can be wildly different. The job on paper and the job in the day to day is rarely the same. And I think I had a, a great advisor in, in the studio art department. And when I met with him to talk about my plans to be an architect, he said, how about you don't do that?
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Before Cameron Turner lived out his dream of being an architect, he thought he would spend a couple of years in product management at Microsoft. But like another recent guest, a couple years turned into many more. Ultimately, his interest in helping people solve their design and productivity challenges was put to use in myriad ways. Find out how creating new worlds is sometimes less about what you construct and more about how people feel at home in what you build…on today’s Roads Taken, with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today, I'm here with Cameron Turner and we are gonna talk about building things and building lives, and then maybe figuring out that it's not all about building but who knows? So, Cameron, it's great to have you here.
CT: Thanks so much for having me, Leslie. This is great.
LJR: Okay. So we start these the same way with all of our guests with two questions and they are these: When you were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
CT: Well, I have the advantage of being the 100th and something in the queue. So yeah, no excuse for not being ready for those two questions for sure. But I will say, in regards to the first question in college, I had no idea who I was. I thought I did. I guess all of us probably thought we did. But yeah, certainly was getting to know myself and have to credit my classmates to a large extent for that process that, you know, I think we kind of all went through together. But just in terms of background, my freshman year, I had sort of the good fortune of being put into a five-room quad in South Fayerweather. So we had two bathrooms and a single and a triple and a common room built into one unit at 102 South Fayer. And as myself, someone I went to high school with actually came to Dartmouth and we were together, and two others, all four of us, I would say were, you know, sort of one quarter extrovert and three quarters introvert. But together we kind of made one extrovert. And so, you know, we had these parties cause we had so much square footage in this place. We had these parties freshman year where it was kind of like we got to know, we, I think we kind of intentionally forced ourselves to get to know so many people in our class, which was, which ended up being so fun for the rest of the four years to kind of have met people who came and, you know, hung out on a Friday night before, you know, going out and doing other things.
But that was, you know, sort of formative for me in that room. I brought along from home a drafting board, like a full size drafting board, and put it in our room, which must have been really annoying for my roommates. They were kind and never said anything, but you know. I was taking studio art classes, declared studio art major early with intention of architecture.
So, you know, was trying to put together an arch—Dartmouth doesn't have an architecture degree. So I kind of had to cobble it together, take some classes at University of Washington during junior year, and do engineering and studio art and stuff in order to try to build a portfolio. But my plan was fully to go to architecture school.
And so all the way through senior year doing independent study work. And I did like an independent study to build like a giant monument for an Arab prince. Like it was a global competition and stuff like that for Dartmouth credit somehow. So really weird stuff, but all of it was to, you know, this path that I thought I was on to go into architecture and interned at, at a bunch of different firms.
And then at graduation did some of the corporate recruiting just because it seemed like all of a sudden you wake up, you know, senior winter, and like people are walking across the green in heels and suits and stuff. You're like, what's going on here? Like, I wanna know what's going on
LJR: And I missed the memo.
CT: Yeah. So I got involved in that. Ended up with, with a, a couple of offers. I was at my Hinman box in in the hop and there was a rejection letter in there from Microsoft. And it's like, thin envelope, not a good sign. You open it: Thank you for your interest, we’ll keep you on file, whatever. So I was feeling kind of sad about that because I'm a Washington state native and kind of had this idea that would be cool to like end up back, you know, in Seattle and had a lot of friends from high school there. And I went over to check my blitz mail. And I got not a, not an email, but a blitz mail from my roommate like, Hey, you just got a voicemail from a recruiter at Microsoft. And they wanna know if you're interested in working in Cupertino and I'm like, absolutely. And so I called the guy back. I'm like, definitely interested in your Cupertino opportunity. Like tell me more, blah, blah. I had no idea where Cupertino was, you know, I should have, right? You know, I had no idea where Cupertino was just like, was gonna accept that offer. So I ended up using my studio art degree and I should preface this based on your question that my thinking was okay, well, I've got these student loans, like, would be good to like go into like a tech job, just get those taken care of before I start taking on more debt to go to go to grad school. So that was the plan. I'll just take two years…
LJR: But had you, yeah, but had you shelved the idea of architecture or this was just like a payoff and experience and then I will definitely go be an architect?
CT: Yeah. Payoff and experience. And was even talking to architecture firms in Seattle, kind of thinking about this stepping stone move and all of that. Yeah. So it's definitely still in the plans to go to architecture school and yeah, I thought, well, I'll do software for a couple years and then see what happens.
Well, I think, you know, like everyone's story to some extent, like things go differently than you think. And it was a pretty neat job. The reason I was in Cupertino is that's where the PowerPoint team was, which was an acquisition by Microsoft. There were only 80 of us in the world building PowerPoint. I came in as an assistant product manager. So I was technically an inbound market researcher. I had an amazing boss who's gone on to do amazing stuff and is actually still a client of mine. And she's about three weeks into the job, she said, pack your bags. We're gonna do a world tour. We're gonna see all of Microsoft's customers. So we went to four continents visited, you know, a whole bunch of fortune, 100 companies got to go sit in boardrooms and sort of just represent Microsoft and hear what they're doing with technology and what they want to do with technology. And that was just such a great experience. I know like a lot of people with consulting jobs have similar where you just get to dabble in so many different cultures and corporate cultures and geographies and people with different languages and then you go out and you eat all the different food and like do all the stuff that…
LJR: But, but during the day you're talking tech or at least listening to tech and yes, you took engineering classes, but they weren't of the technical type. They were probably structural and all that sort of thing, right?
CT: Yeah. Well, backing up to senior year, I had done pretty much exclusively studio art and then electives to get my major done and realized, wow, I need to get some, some engineering in here. So decided to do an engineer minor my senior year inclusively. So did kind of all of it, except for Engines 21, which I've heard a couple of your guests talk about—amazing class. Except for that, I think I did all of it senior year. So senior spring when people were like swimming and stuff, like I was buried at Thayer, like pulling all-nighters and eating green card meals and stuff like that, just to get that done. And then we have the non-recording option, you know, which you get, like, I forget if it's one or two like classes where you can make them into pass/fail. And that was very strategic for me because I was taking four classes senior spring versus the standard three. And one of them was an advanced CS class. And my goal was to get a, you know, a 60…
LJR: Right.
CT: Like barely pass it, because I had to put all my energy into the other three, cuz the problem sets and all that. I ended up getting a 59.5.
LJR: No.
CT: My professor passed me anyway. Thank you, professor . And I got my in, you know, I got my minor, I got my degree after…
LJR: And a job at Microsoft
CT:…which I got to walk down. Yeah. Collect an actual diploma on graduation day and, and all the rest. So it worked out fine, but that was a little bit of a nail biter and not how I would re-live my Dartmouth experience, if I could do it over again, but the first three years were tons of fun. So, you know, South Fayerweather parties and all that were great.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But I bring that up because, yes. So it sounds like you had some CS, but not a lot of background in technology. I mean, nobody did, it was the beginning of, you know, what has become technology in that world. But did that hamper you at all? Were you like ever looking around going, I'm an, I'm an art guy. Like what am I doing here?
CT: Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think, well, imposter syndrome has followed me my entire career and lives with me today.
LJR: Like many of us
CT: So I’ll just put that out there turning right away, but definitely in that function, like, obviously much better qualified people from a software engineering standpoint to go take a seat at Microsoft than, you know, the kid who's been building stuff out of plaster for, you know, for four years or whatever. So yes, absolutely. The interesting side note on that sort of strategically was at that time CorelDraw had just acquired WordPerfect. And so the belief that Bill Gates and his group had at that moment was that in order to effectively take over the productivity suite space, WordPerfect had to be addressed. And the only way to affect WordPerfect was to counter CorelDraw. So my job at PowerPoint, which was the graphics product unit, was to build the Office drawing toolbar that we use now that has the shapes and the things. And now Google docs has something similar and all the rest. But at that moment, there were no drawing tools. If you needed to do a drawing, you went to a graphics product and you bought CorelDraw or something like that. And then you imported that graphic into your document. So my job was to first, you know, travel around, figure out what people needed to do inside their documents and then build that capability into those.
So it was just really lucky, I think, that, you know, I was kind of into AutoCAD and CAD because of my internships at architecture firms, and kind of knew sort of the vector art space for software and happened to have a studio art background that was then of interest. So it led into some interesting conversations. Within one month of landing at Microsoft, I was demoing a potential acquisition target for, for Bill in his boardroom. And he had, you know, a giant, what was then a giant screen. It felt like a giant screen. I just remember seeing, looking up at the projection and seeing my mouse just kind of wiggle, cuz I was shaking. I was so nervous giving this demo
LJR: ‘cuz you were 22, right?
CT: Ah, yeah, 22 or 21 actually at that point. Yeah, yeah, yeah
LJR:. Oh my gosh. Wow. Okay. So you were among 80 people building this world and inside this company that was gonna become, I mean, was already Microsoft, but like how long did you stay there? And what was the trajectory?
CT: Yeah. Yeah. It was about, it was longer than most. And I remember being teased by all my 96 classmates about not having switched jobs, but I stuck around until 2002. I started my first consulting firm, actually consulting right back into Microsoft initially. And then went over to the UK and did an MBA. And so that was sort of like the, the first time I left and then during my MBA started a company as part of the curriculum, which is why I chose the MBA program I did at Oxford and then moved that company to the Bay Area and grew it for several years until eventually we had some interest from a couple parties to be acquired and then, you know, got in touch with you know, folks that I had known at Microsoft. And, and ultimately the thing that we were doing. Ended up being exactly something strategically that Microsoft wanted to do. So ended up getting, you know, pulled back by gravity, back into Microsoft for another three years as a part of an earnout for that deal. And yeah. Got to integrate the technology that I had built. And that's when I really kind of fell in love with data. So, you know, I guess just zooming out, like I kind of went into tech and I had this realization actually thinking about this conversation, it. Now I do consulting and data for, you know, a whole bunch of industries. It's not really a tech job. You know, we're kind of a tech consulting firm at Kin + Carta, but we're dabbling in all kinds of different industries and I'm really focused more on the data side. So you know, software building is different from data, product building. And so anyway, it's sort of been this winding path, I guess, to where things are today.
LJR: Yeah. And I wanna talk about the data building part and kind of how you're working in that space, but it is so different from building a product, building a company that then gets subsumed all of those things. Those are building, and they seem a little closer to the kind of building that you might have envisioned for yourself early on. So when was it that, I mean, you were…you were using your creative self to be the product person and integrate all the things that need to be integrated in a really useful visual kind of thing. So I can, I can feel that artist, architect coming out and I'm sure that there were pieces that you were like, yeah, this feels really integral to kind of who I am and what. But were there moments where you were like, okay, I'm kind of putting that part to bed, you know? The two years turned into more than that. When did it become clear, like you were okay with letting that piece go?
CT: That's a great question. I think one of the things maybe your listeners would resonate with is the idea of what you have of a profession and what it actually is in day to day practice can be wildly different, you know? Because of the job on paper and the job in the day to day is rarely the same.
And I think I had a great advisor in the late and great Ben Moss in the studio art department at Dartmouth. And when I met with him to talk about my plans to be an architect, he said, “How about you don't do that?” And I don't know if it was a judgment on the quality of my work, which in retrospect, maybe I had zero talent which is very likely, you know. Or, you know, he was kind of thinking along those lines, as well, in terms of, you know, the things that I got excited about and designing some hypothetical, you know, monument for an Arab prince is nothing like the day to day.
And I did get some flavor for that. I was working at an architecture firm in Hanover, and one of the projects was the rebuild of the Concord High School. And they had not yet adopted AutoCAD. So there's no copy and paste or anything like that in building out these blueprints that are Mylar, you know, with plastic lead on them. And so I was a draftsman there and my job was to draw every single pane of glass on the front of the Concord High School including the mullions, the little pieces of wood that hold in, you know, so there's literally probably tens of thousands of little triangles I have to draw. And that was my job. And I did it for a quarter like that one drawing, I, I can't even tell you. And it was like that moment of like, wow, so this is…this is where things are. And I think one of the things with software that's really cool is the scalability, you know. And Marc Andreesen is local guy here in Palo Alto that spends a lot of time talking about this. He says, one of the greatest things about software is you can sell it and also still own it. Like you can give it away and you can still have it. It's like it has this digital characteristic to it. And so the scalability of what you can do in digital space by definition is you know, in some ways almost infinite, relative to the built world…to your question where you build it once, and if you're gonna build another high school, you design it again. [LJR: Yeah.] Hopefully you design it again. Hopefully you don’t hand out the same thing 20 times, although that's happening more and more these days. But architecture is your scale is very linear in terms of how many projects. I mean, the best architects in the, in the world, Frank Lloyd Wright still have a portfolio that fit in a single book, you know, whereas like your ability to have…be a change agent, I think in the world with software is, is really cool. So to me, that's the thing that really stuck is you can publish software in a way that you literally can have a, a billion people in a year using something that, that you created.
LJR: That definitely makes sense and keeps you keeps us in that world up to the software point. And now you've had a company acquired, been part of that deal. How does the next step work for you?
CT: Yeah, well, not to just tell the story, you know, all, all the way down, but briefly after that my wife and I had such a great experience living in, in Oxford. We got married on a Saturday and we left on a Tuesday for Europe and we just stayed there for a year and left our family and friends behind and just had a wonderful year. And so after three years back in Seattle we had our first baby. It rained every day. So we were home bound indoors, no grass, no sunshine. And we just decided we wanna do something different. So we tried to, you know, rinse and repeat our strategy on, on Oxford. And we applied for preschool for my then two year old daughter down at Stanford. And I applied for the stats master's program.
It was a hard decision and this is like one of those hard pivots that you look back and it's like, life could be very, very different. But I went to lunch with my boss, who's another amazing female boss that I've had, that's been so influential in my life. We went out to lunch and she said, you know, you run data at Microsoft right now. I'm thinking of combining data and user research and design into a new org and I'd like you to lead that, which I was completely unqualified for, for starters. But also, you know, would've been an amazing role. But I had already sort of built this plan that involved, you know, sunshine and green grass and, you know, baby on the grass and all this stuff in my head. We were renting our house on Lake Washington at the time. And so we weren't really bound to be there and turned that down. And, and we went back to school. We, we moved into the dorms, literally in our thirties, you know, late thirties and you know, had our two year old there. And then had another baby came along our boy and yeah, and we've just been in Palo Alto ever since. And it turns out in retrospect, like that was a good move because there's no way we would've found housing [LJR: Right.] in the Bay Area at that point. So yeah. So came back to the Bay Area and right away started doing applied AI projects, industrial AI machine learning deployments into a bunch of different spaces.
Part of the strategy also was finding great classmates to work with. You know, a bunch of us were working on different projects under the company that was eventually acquired by Kin + Carta.
LJR: When you think about the elements of AI now that is kind of the core of what you do, what’s the tie in to past experience to kind of your design ethos, that kind of is at the core of who you are? How do you reflect on that?
CT: Yeah. Well, I think that the silver thread for all this, and, and I've heard some of your other guests talk about this too, is that you can always do better with data. Like having data and using it to influence your decisions, your design, your protocol, your policy, your curriculum. You'll always do better with more signal and then it becomes a process of how you manage that. And ethics can be a part of that. Governance can certainly be a part of that and so forth. But one of the things I saw early on in the tech industry, in the nineties, I mean, and I think we're all subject to this as, as technology consumers, is you kind of get what you get, you know. And then hopefully the company has done enough from a design standpoint in order to solve some of your problems without taking you through too much friction in learning to use technology and so forth. But I remember software coming with big manuals and stuff. You had to sit down and learn and all of that. That's just not there anymore. And the reason it's not is because we've really taken to heart as an industry the feedback loop that can be generated by data about how we as users experience technology and making sure that the technology fits the problems that we have and does so in a seamless way.
And so that going back to that first role in 1996, you know, it was about bringing that customer voice into the design process. And sometimes that led to some very late night arguments with engineering, right? About like, this is not important to our users, but this thing is that we're ignoring. You know, as one example, this is gonna sound sort of trite, but I had a friend who was an engineer at PowerPoint, and we had gone done research and one of the things we saw people doing is trying to rotate images, which now of course, seems like so basic, but that wasn't something that was built in. And so he and I literally, after midnight one night, snuck that code into PowerPoint so that you could rotate an image around, you know. So it's just little things like that that actually make technology fit what we want to do as users. And so I think that that story has now graduated into AI, where instead of trying to create, you know, the quote, unquote average user and trying to design for that person, you know, we graduated into scenarios and thinking about how different types of users use technology in different ways. But now with AI, we have a capability to create truly differentiated product based on individuals. And that's not just software and, and software experiences, but also all the branding and marketing we experience, advertising all those things. And the hope is that, you know, as we get better at that, it's less noisy. And it's less gratuitous and it's more meaningful to actually help people. And we're seeing huge advancements in that today. If you look at the healthcare space as an example where personalized care and care pathways have come a tremendous way from where sort of we started, which is protocol that predefined exactly how patients were treated for certain chief complaints. So I think we're on the cusp of seeing, you know, sort of this Cambrian explosion of AI capability that actually makes sense to people. It's not about, you know, humanoids walking the earth and like, you know, bringing you food. It's more about what we experience on a day to day basis, really superpower enabling all of us to do whatever we do better.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I can see you've been involved at so many levels of business. You know, somebody who built a business that then got taken, you know, somebody who's watching other businesses get built along the way. And yet it seems like you are so close to the customer in everything you do. Like that's where your heart and spirit seems to be. And I think that that is very well attuned to whatever it was in high school that made you think I wanna be an architect. Like architects don't just go build buildings and then hope that people are gonna walk into them and use them. Right? Like it's client based and it's the needs of the inhabitants. And I, I like that idea. That's kind of followed you.
CT: Yeah. Well, I love that you're doing these conversations at this point in all of our career, cuz it's this, it is this sort of, you know, pivot point where we've got to a point achieved something randomly or, or otherwise. And now we sort of have this question about the second half of career, you know, what do we wanna do? What do we wanna give back? And you know, all those questions start coming to play. I'm really challenged by scale. And think about that question you asked in terms of when you become too close to specific problems, do you inhibit your ability to tackle much larger problems for a broader set of people? So the, the geeky way you know, I've tried to solve for that in my own career is to think about automation layers on top of AI and machine learning. The company that I started that was just acquired had a platform that was focused just on automated machine learning. So it's essentially AI to build AI. So how can we get out of the business of selling three to six month projects to build custom AI systems and instead have a platform where inside of an hour, we can have something up and running that's already generating value. But I think your question about, like, where do you, where do you base your altitude has something to do both with, like how much breadth, like how much of the landscape can you see, but also how much scale you can achieve. And I'm really impressed by our classmates who've moved on to CXO roles in huge organizations and, you know, kind of have that, you know, that scale sort of built into their job title. But I think I would miss sort of the day to day conversations and problem solving and engineering in a role like that as well. So it's a personal challenge.
LJR: Yeah, for sure. So when you think back, Cameron, to that young 21 year old who didn't know why those corporate recruiters were coming, but you thought you'd, you know, give it a try and you either told him or told Ben Moss where you are now and what you're doing and kind of this little trajectory, what do you think either or both of them would say?
CT: Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. And then another one I should be prepared or better prepared for. Yeah. I mean, I think sometimes, you know, we're talking on this, in this conversation about common threads and I think a lot of times it's very difficult to identify what that common thread will be when you're at the beginning of the path. But in retrospect, you look back and like, you can clearly connect the dots and it's like, okay yeah, there's that sort of thing I'm passionate about that I would never, you know, not be close to customer, like we're just talking about, and that's gonna lead me back to entrepreneurship, you know, in some way. So I think the only thing that you can do is pursue what you know to be your passion, because by definition then you'll have a tail end wind in what you're working on. It makes it makes things easier. In my case, like my, my passion for architecture may not have been what I'm good at. And this is like going back to Andreesen Horowitz. This is something Ben Horowitz talks about is like, don't do what you're passionate about, do what you're good at. So that also is a tremendous tailwind. If you can do both then that's great, but I think a lot of times putting a pin into exactly what it is about your current job, you know, as a part of your longer term trajectory is challenging.
And I think the other half of it too, is people at places like Dartmouth, you know, and there's lots and lots of places like Dartmouth, but people at places like Dartmouth, we have this focus on like the what's next. Always. Right? By definition, like ,it's four years, there is an end, you know, hopefully four years or not too much longer. And then you're doing the next thing. But I think especially, you know, being, you know, 48, you look at it and you can say, well, maybe where I am right now is exactly where I'm meant to be. You know? And that's enough, like, to know that with some level of certainty and that's kind of, kind of where I'm at right now.
LJR: Yeah. And I could tell that when we saw another in Hanover for our reunion, that you are one of those people that recognizes yeah, where I am is where I'm supposed to be. And that's a gift you've given yourself. We don't all get there with that clarity, but I'm so glad you are feeling that and that you are there and who knows where the next step will take us, right, or take you, but we'll look forward to seeing where it does take you and wish you all the best.
CT: Thanks, Leslie.
LJR: That was Cameron Turner, Vice President of Data Science for Kin + Carta, who acquired Datorium, one of the companies he founded. He is an executive data science leader, applied AI specialist, and serial entrepreneur with a track record of digital transformation and build out of new data-driven businesses. He and his family continue to soak in the sunshine in Palo Alto.
We hope you are continuing to soak up insight and wisdom from our guests each week. We’d love it if you passed along a link to an episode or to our website RoadsTakenShowDOTcom so that more people – either those at their midlife facing lots of twists on their roads or those just starting out and picking a first path to travel—can benefit from the collective stories of our guests. We are so proud of the people they have been, are, and will become. And we’re so thankful that you’re along on this journey with them and me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on RoadsTaken.