The Song That Changed My Life: Waynn Lue

By Waynn Lue (@waynnlue): Xoogler, Entrepreneur, Startup Advisor/Investor

The first CD I ever received was the first Backstreet Boys album. A friend of mine gave it to me as a birthday present and said, “I know you like hiphop, so I got you this album.”

From those inauspicious beginnings, I started building up the biggest collection of video game music albums I could find, from Yasunori Mitsuda’s beautiful orchestral soundtrack for Chrono Trigger to Nobuo Uematsu’s classic Final Fantasy albums. I joined a forum dedicated to video game music called Gamingforce (I just checked, my account’s still valid there!), set up an FTP, and started learning everything I could about digital media. I learned IRC, and started using tools to create my own remixes, hoping to emulate some of the best songs I heard off of OverClockedRemix (http://ocremix.org/). I studied up on TCP/IP and networking, DMZs and NATs, all concepts that I used for my CS senior project years later. In short, it was one of the reasons I got into entrepreneurship and technology to begin with. I still listen to those albums, though these days I’m using different tools.

And the Backstreet Boys album? It was actually pretty solid.

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