The Story Behind the Story

Twenty years ago, I was selling televisions at Best Buy. I could not read a book on the sales floor, but I kept thinking: what if your phone could be a window into the world of a book? What if the characters could step out of the page and into the room around you? I would stand there between the flatscreens, imagining a future where stories were not trapped on paper. They lived in the space around you.

I told my roommate Pete about the idea, and he got it immediately. We spent months talking about it, sketching interfaces on napkins, dreaming about what it could become. But life had other plans for us. Jobs changed, cities changed, and the idea sat quietly in the background, waiting.

In June 2006, I was diagnosed with a very rare and deadly form of liver cancer. The doctors gave me a 2% chance of seeing 2007. In the hospital, staring at the ceiling, I kept coming back to that same wish: I wanted my phone to take me somewhere else. Somewhere I could walk around with the characters I loved and forget, even for a moment, what was happening to my body. Books had always been my escape, but lying in that bed, I wanted more than words. I wanted to be inside the story.

I beat the odds. And that vision never left me. Today, it is called OutPaged. What started as a daydream on a Best Buy sales floor, and survived a hospital room, is now a product that lets anyone step inside a story. Pete, Joanna, and I built this company because we believe reading should be more than words on a screen. It should be something you experience.