Today we’d like to introduce you to Bill Kerig.
Hi Bill, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
The dinner party question—So, Bill, what do you do?—often guarantees that I will be left alone.
I’m a start-up specialist, I say, and then attempt to fill in the blanks: I create things where none existed before, build teams, bring products to market, get them going, and then hand off.
Uh huh. A furtive glance.
I make films, write books, and create startups. I’m currently working on my sixth film, my fourth book, and my seventh tech start-up…
Oh look, they’ve brought out the cheesecake!
And then I’m alone at the party once more.
I still love it here; I would’ve never lived a creative life if I’d stayed in the East where I felt pre-destined to have a middling career in something sensible—hustling insurance perhaps or pedaling stocks—in the narrative of someone else’s script.
I started down that road. After college and an enjoyable summer of working on boats, I bought some off-the-rack suits, an over-priced cashmere overcoat, and moved to Manhattan with the mistaken notion that there, among the suspenders-wearing finance bros of the 1980s, I’d make my fortune in short order before escaping to somewhere I really did want to live.
It didn’t work out.
I sold the suits to a thrift store in the East Village and wore the cashmere coat onto a westbound plane to Salt Lake City. Met at the curb by a handful of my college buddies who were reveling in a ski bum lifestyle, the cashmere coat was the source of great hilarity.
You’re going to look great in that coat in the kitchen at Snowbird!
I’d already arranged my new career, landing a coveted dishwashing job at The Cliff Lodge. Though I wouldn’t be wearing the cashmere to operate the Hobart, I just couldn’t part with it because surely I’d use it one day, when I returned to Boston or New York to take up the more responsible path that college had supposedly prepared me for.
Over the years, the moths carried away chunks of the cashmere, and my imminent return to the East Coast went with it.
I worked one season at Snowbird and it was among the happiest times of my life. While I was there, a nascent mogul-skiing professional tour made a stop in Utah, and I became entranced by it. Thinking I might be able to make a living by competing in moguls, I moved to Vail, Colorado, which was more central to the tour’s slate of events. A decade went by, during which I landed sponsors, skied for a living, and also kicked off a writing career at the local newspaper. Magazines and books followed, and, having met and been mentored by a Hollywood screenwriter, I wrote a couple of terrible film scripts.
While writing a magazine story about a colorful Utah entrepreneur named Kenny Griswold, who’d bought Park West Ski Area and renamed it Wolf Mountain, I was offered the chance to write and produce a film that he had dreamed up. I moved back to Utah, and after we made a film called Net Worth, I followed it to Los Angeles, where I’d surely make my fortune as a writer/director and then move somewhere I really did want to live.
That didn’t work.
After flailing around LA for almost two years, I relocated to San Diego, where I’d been hired to run a fledgling internet company. I liked it there well enough and planned to make a fortune in tech and then move to where I really wanted to live. As this was the height of the dot-com boom, you’ll know the trajectory of the endeavor. Crazy excitement, lavish expenditures, and a lot of hard work. We took the company public on the American exchange, and then the bottom fell out.
I decided to move to a place where I really wanted to live and see if I could find something to do there.
Thinking that Utah might be the place, I arrived in Salt Lake City on Halloween night 1999, guiding the U-Haul through the hordes of trenchcoated, sunglass-wearing Neos (The Matrix had just come out). As Utah was two years away from the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, I rode a surge of curiosity into an assignment to write a guidebook about the unexpected side of the Beehive State. For the next two years, my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I rode my motorcycle around the state, poking our noses into any place that might surprise a visitor. “From coffee shops to gay bars” is how the publisher referred to our journey on the back cover of Utah Underground: A Guide to Real Fun.
The book functioned as our due diligence into the livability of this crazy place.
This worked out.
Salt Lake City has been a place where I felt the freedom to create what I want, when I want. I’m currently working on a film about the 60-year freestyle skiing revolution, a book about growing older and bolder, and a sport-tech product that aggregates, evaluates, and shares all human and analytical data about the professional sport of ice hockey.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has been anything but smooth, but I have a great wife and a strong family, and that has made all the difference. Before we got married, she told me I just had to promise her one thing.
I agreed—anything you want.
I figured she’d say, Always be faithful or always be responsible and keep a roof over our heads.
But she didn’t say either of those things.
Instead, she said, Don’t ever bore me.
Twenty-five years later, I’m pretty sure I’ve kept that promise.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Whether it’s making films, writing books, or guiding sport-tech companies, I endeavor to create strong partnerships. The tagline of one of my films was No One Rides Alone and that’s a truism.
I believe that finding and aligning with the right people—whether in your organization, in synergistic groups, and even with your most formidable competitor—to work together toward common goals is the key to success.
I’m afraid my strange, convoluted career path naturally sets me apart from others. I usually struggle to explain it over cocktails. But I really don’t want to be set apart; I want to be more integrated in the lives of other creative and engaged people, wherever I find them.
Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
I remember skating on an untouched, miles-long frozen pond, glass-smooth and perfectly translucent. You could see fish under the ice, our skates effortlessly cut white grooves into the surface, leaving tracks like skiers on an untracked powder run, and we were able to make three-hundred-yard-long hockey passes. I was with my whole family and a few neighborhood friends. The ice spoke to us, making all these weird croaks and squeaks as we skated across it, and we didn’t know what it was saying, but it surely had something to do with magic.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.billkerig.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/billkerig/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bill.kerig
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-a-kerig/
