his hockey and lacrosse careers, both of which he continued with at Harvard. In all my years of coaching lacrosse at Hotchkiss, Ethan was the only player to actually play all four positions in the game of lacrosse, and I am sure that he is sharing that same versatility, flexibility, and spectrum of insight in his endeavors as the CEO of SpiderOak.” After graduating from Hotchkiss in 1995, he went to Harvard, where he majored in sociology, but found the university less than fulfilling to someone who says he had “absolutely no idea” about what he wanted to do as a career. He found Harvard to be “a very grown-up place” that focused on excellence, but didn’t place as much emphasis on community as he would have liked. He also laments today: “I don’t think [Harvard]… helps you understand the other possibilities of life outside of banking, or becoming a lawyer or becoming a doctor or becoming a consultant.” Once Oberman graduated from Harvard in 1999, he went to New York to work as a film producer with a friend on a movie called “Artemin Goldberg Custom Tailor of Brassieres,” a mock documentary about an old Jewish brassiere maker. Oberman said movie making was a “fun way to live” but constantly challenging: “There are a billion decisions to be made literally every day and there are always things going wrong, and you’re always walking around trying to solve as many problems as you can given the limited budget that you have.” Because the dot-com crash was occurring around the same time as his work on the film wound down, Oberman said that “being in New York and not having a whole lot of money and not knowing what your next move in life is going to be is never really a good idea. I sort of learned that the hard way.” But since Oberman always liked design and “building things,” he then went back home to Chicago and worked for nine months as a furniture-maker, building objects like dining room tables and side
PHOTO: © BARBARA BUTKUS PHOTOGRAPHY
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tables which he mostly sold to friends. In 2001, he started working on an email marketing product called O-Mail for his family business Omeda Communications, which manages circulation and customer lists for film and publishing companies. After about four years of doing that, he decided it was time to move on and take a year off to travel. He would go to different places for weeks or months on end, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and New York. “The theme for the year was: I do not have a meeting at that time. So friends would call and say ‘hey, Ethan, let’s go to Croatia. I want to put on my bachelor's party in Croatia.’ Or ‘hey, I’d like to go skiing in Tahoe.’” Oberman would usually agree and respond: “I don’t have a meeting at that time.” After his year of travel, Oberman worked with a friend-turned-business partner to create SpiderOak, partly inspired after having trouble transferring a file from one computer to another. While he admits that it’s tough to start a company, he says the main challenges after founding a business are to keep customers
happy and find ways to grow revenue and profits. Oberman and SpiderOak also started Zero Knowledge Privacy Foundation, which advocates for stricter rules on online privacy. He is slated to testify before the California legislature to support the Right to Know Act, which would require companies, if requested, to tell their customers what data they have collected on them and who they’ve shared it with. As Oberman put it: “When companies aren’t transparent about what they’re doing, it then raises privacy concerns around: why aren’t you telling us what you’re doing? Maybe you’re doing things that you shouldn’t be doing with my data…If I were to sit down at your computer and start looking through all your stuff, even though you didn’t have anything bad on there, those are your things! They’re your things and you wouldn't want someone riffling through them for any reason.” DANIEL LIPPMAN ’08 IS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST BASED IN WASHINGTON, D.C. AND HAS WRITTEN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS, REUTERS, AND THE HUFFINGTON POST. HE CAN BE REACHED AT DLIPPMAN@GWMAIL.GWU.EDU
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