Hi, my name is Kevin Leneway and I am the co-founder of Haiku Deck. I created this presentation to share a little bit more about me, my family, and the things that are important to me.

But first, I wanted to say a sincere thank you for visiting our site. We are on a mission to reinvent presentations from the ground up, with a focus on helping you quickly create beautiful, effective stories, and hopefully have a little fun along the way.

If there's ever anything we can do better, or you just want to say hi, please email me: kevin@haikudeck.com.

there really is a Kalamazoo. It's my hometown, and yes, that really is our town motto.

Technically, I was born on a farm in a small town outside of Kalamazoo called Wayland, and moved to the slightly-larger-but-still-tiny town of Otsego when I was in middle school.

Michigan is a wonderful place to grow up. Plenty of lakes for swimming and fishing in the summer, and lots of snowball fights in the winter. Small, tight-knit communities are the norm, and I attribute much of my laidback-but-hardworking personality to my traditional Midwestern upbringing.

Growing up in a sleepy Midwestern town has it's advantages. The long winters give plenty of time to hang out inside and play around with computers.

My dad was a true alpha geek and was always bringing home the latest gadgets for us to play with. While I had fun with the Atari and Tandy, the Commodore 64 was a revelation to me. There was something so incredibly empowering and fun to be able to type a few commands into the machine and see the results.

It's strange to look back and see that the day-to-day work I do every day is pretty much the same thing I was doing for fun as a 10-year-old boy. The technology may have advanced a bit, but I still get that same rush when I roll out a new feature to Haiku Deck.

After high school, I followed in my sister's footsteps and attended the University of Michigan. I majored in Computer Engineering with a minor concentration in Psychology.

I played tuba in high school, and one of my best life decisions was to try out for the Michigan Marching Band as a freshman. As luck would have it, the football team went undefeated and won a national championship, and performing in front of 100K people during the Rose Bowl halftime show is a memory I'll never forget.

Ann Arbor is one of my favorite places on earth and you can still find me yelling at the TV screen every Saturday in the fall.

After college, I decided to take a year off and do something totally different. Both my parents are teachers, and I've always enjoyed tutoring, so I volunteered to teach in a middle school computer lab in Central Washington.

My time in Americorps is something I look back on as one of the most fun and exciting times in my life. One of the biggest lessons I learned is that money definitely does not buy happiness. We spent many nights playing Cranium, eating spaghetti, drinking cheap beer, and talking long into the night.

One of my goals in building Haiku Deck is to create an app that could be used in the classroom as well as the boardroom, so it's been incredibly gratifying to see the strong reception we're receiving from early adopters in the Ed Tech community.

After settling in to Seattle and spending close to a year doing consulting with Accenture, I was hired into the Microsoft partner strategy team where I spent five years in developer relations.

It was during this time that the seed for Haiku Deck was planted. I was struggling with PowerPoint late one night and decided to try something new. Instead of cramming a ton of info onto a slide, I used a technique of using full-screen images with minimal text to highlight my main points. The presentation was a hit, and I began using that style for many decks during my time at MS.

Before I left Accenture, I met a wonderful woman who I would eventually marry on a beach in Hawaii. We both wanted to start a family someday, but first there was some exploring to do.

We made a pact to travel to a new place every year for the first five years we were married. The first trip was Europe, then Thailand, Tanzania, Egypt, and finally Costa Rica.

While it was fun exploring all the new places, the best part was creating shared life-long memories with my beautiful wife.

After college I visited Seattle on a recruiting trip and while I didn't get the job, I fell in love with the city. So despite having no job or place to live, I packed up everything I owned in my car, drove cross-country and started my new life as a Seattleite.

I've been living here for over a decade, and it's definitely the place I plan to stay for a long, long time. What a beautiful city full of weird and wonderful people.

Our first child, Ethan Joseph Leneway, was born on August 28th, 2011.

Being a father is such a life-changing and joyous experience, and I'm loving (almost) every minute of it.

These days, I live my life by a pretty simple mantra. Be a good husband, be a good dad, and be a good entrepreneur - in that order. The rest is all details.

One of the best pieces of advice I've received as an entrepreneur is to build something people will love. We spoke with hundreds of people while building Haiku Deck, and one thing was certain - people spent a lot of time creating presentations, and they most definitely did not love the process.

From day one, we've been obsessively focused on delivering a new type of presentation tool. Our mission is to help users present their ideas as quickly and effectively as possible, and hopefully have a little fun along the way.

We want you to love our app, and if you don't, please tell us so we can make it better. You can contact me at anytime: kevin@haikudeck.com. Thanks for reading this, and I look forward to seeing your "About Me" deck soon. :)