Connecting the dots
by Joel Hoekstra
Steven Snyder
Photo by Jayme Halbritter
In business as in the liberal arts, making creative links is the start of success, says entrepreneur Steven Snyder.
Last year, Snyder, a one-time Microsoft executive and the former CEO and chairman of a high-flying Twin Cities tech firm, enrolled in his first creative writing course at the U. It was a struggle at first, he admits, but this businessman's voyage into the murky waters of fiction, memoir, and creative nonfiction ultimately proved liberating. “Just imagine a person who’d been shackled by years of creative stifling in regard to the written word, and who now sees a whole new way of expressing oneself,” Snyder says. “That was me.”
Snyder may be a high-tech guy with an undergrad degree in math, but his grounding is firmly in the liberal arts. A resident of Orono, Minn., Snyder earned a master's in psychology from the U in 1990, and a Ph.D. in 1994. He always knew, he says, that the U was an incubator for innovation, a place where good ideas were born and nurtured.
Net Perceptions, Inc., the Twin Cities company that Snyder founded with U computer science professor John Riedl in 1996, got its start selling software hatched at the U. The firm's personalization and precision-marketing software, a blend of technology and psychology, was adopted by Amazon.com and other Internet companies. “The University provided the foundation and the psychology that helped me recognize the importance of collaborative filtering as a technology, which led to the creation of Net Perceptions,” Snyder says.
The startup went public in 1999 and achieved a stock price of nearly $60 per share before the collapse of the tech sector in 2001. The company's rise and ongoing business, however, have been a boon all along to the University, which licenses the technology (developed at the U) to Net Perceptions for commercial use.
Snyder was just 13 years old when his father, a technical writer with the electronics company RCA, came home from work with a computer manual. It was the late 1960s, and computers were still both rare and as big as houses, but the elder Snyder seemed to be acting on a hunch. “I remember him handing the book to me,” the younger Snyder recalls. “He said, ‘Here, I think you might be interested in this.’”
In fact, the boy was fascinated by the subject—and as computers unleashed a tsunami of global change in business and culture over the next three decades, Snyder rode the wave to professional success. While still in high school, he got an after-school job as a computer programmer with the University of Pennsylvania physics department. In 1983, with a bachelor's in mathematics from Drexel University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, Snyder signed on with a promising Seattle company, Microsoft.
During his five years at Microsoft, Snyder worked closely with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer—first managing the company's relationship with IBM, and then as general manager of the language products business unit—where he tripled the group's revenue before retiring at age 33.
The U was the magnet that drew Snyder to the Midwest. “I felt a yearning to give back something to society, and I saw psychology as a way to help people develop and reach their full potential,” Snyder says. On the basis of the psychology department's pioneering reputation, he enrolled in the U's doctoral program, intending to pursue a new career as a clinician or a researcher. But when the conceptual seeds of Net Perceptions resurfaced in a conversation he had with Reidl, Snyder found himself drawn back to business.
These days, Snyder is retired again, and he claims he's not looking for any business opportunities. He left the Net Perceptions board last year and is enrolled in several classes at the U. He recently completed a course in the interpretation of biblical law, and he plays piano with a student jazz combo in the School of Music.
Sharing the wealth
For a man focused for so long on business, the liberal arts offer a smorgasbord of learning opportunities. Snyder is keen on making sure that others can sample widely from such offerings. He recently endowed two graduate student fellowships, one in psychology and one in creative writing. Among other things, he hopes the funds will allow students to take advantage of professional travel opportunities. “One of the things I found in my career was that going to conferences was a very important part not only of graduate education, but of any professional pursuit,” he says.
Whether as preparation for a business career or the icing on the cake, Snyder says he would encourage anyone to plunge into the liberal arts. “The benefits are that you can think more broadly—you can bring ideas across the disciplines,” he says.
“One thing I now do very well, but I couldn't before, is connecting the dots between history, literature, culture, and religion. Making those connections is so important for living in the world. And business is all about connecting the dots, about seeing underlying patterns.”
Steven Snyder is currently the Managing Director of the Snyder Leadership Group.