The human behind this podcast is me, Brian McCullough. Most people now know me for hosting the daily Techmeme Ride Home podcast, giving you that sweet, sweet tech news every day, in 15-20 minute bite-sized chunks at 5pm eastern.

Others might know me for the book that this podcast was the foundation for, called HOW THE INTERNET HAPPENED – FROM NETSCAPE TO THE IPHONE,  published by Liveright, a subsidiary of W.W. Norton.

Here’s my Amazon Author page.

But before all that, I founded ResumeWriters.com in 1999, survived the dotcom bust and grew the company into the premiere player in its space. I co-founded WhoToTalkTo.com, an early social networking player in the job search space (more here). I ran TheJobBored.com from 2007 through 2011 (archives can be found here) and was briefly a Baltimore Sun career columnist during this time. I also co-founded WhereAreTheJobs.com.

I was also honored to be a 2016 TED Resident. My TED Talk from summer 2016 is further down this page.

Arsenal fan. Gator fan. England fan. In that order.

Co-Founder of a startup baby human named Penelope since 2014.

My wife and I launched Maxwell out of beta in 2016.

You can follow me on twitter at @brianmcc

The twitter feed for this podcast is @nethistorypod so follow there for show updates and whatnot.

Want to email me? mail

Brian McCullough Internet History Podcast

This is me. That is Winston.

Here's a fancy-dancy headshot. Photo credit:

Here’s a fancy-dancy headshot. Photo credit: Ryan Lash/TED

Two things inspired me to start this project:

First, I still dabble in angel investing, so I attend a lot of tech meetups and various events like that, largely in NYC. These days, the startup founders you meet are 10 years (or more) younger than me. Over the last few years, I’ve had more than a few conversations wherein a young entrepreneur will say to me, “Wow. You were around in the dot com days? What was that like?” Yes. It makes you feel old. But then I remember, Facebook was founded 10 years ago, and these guys and gals were still in middle school at that point. So, I kinda want this project to be a much overdo summation for the up-and-comers to our industry that explains how we got here.

Second, how many times does this happen to you: you go home for holidays and get asked by family members, “What is this new app I keep hearing about? Do I need to be on it?” At the risk of sounding pedantic, not everyone reads Techmeme every day. And yet, the computers in our pockets and the companies and technologies of the last 20 years have revolutionized all of our lives.

In short, I’m doing this research and posting these podcasts for two audiences: 1) The 14 year old programmer who is just coming up but didn’t live through all this. This project is an effort to tell her the history and catch her up. And 2) My Dad. To explain why the computer in his pocket is more powerful than anything involved in the moon landing and how it is Facebook lets him know in real time what his college roommate had for lunch today.