Doug Richards

The professional history of Doug Richards reads more like a job board than a career path (chef, musician, author, bouncer, professional speaker, promoter, salesman, teacher, coach, entrepreneur, multimedia developer and consultant).
Born into technology Doug is a self-described ‘second generation nerd’ and views technology not as a necessary evil but rather a tool for semantic change. He first started working with web technology in 1991 as an early adopter of the now legendary Mozilla toolset in combination with WinSox proxy. He funded his life as a professional musician through the nineties developing websites and graphics primarily for musicians. In 1996 he was a guest of Allan Ginsburg’s Naropa University and shortly thereafter ended up living and teaching across Mexico for three years. During his time there he pioneered a first generation portal for tourist restaurants and remained heavily involved in the W3C.

In early 2000 he returned to the US and continued to push the boundaries of online development for the Sprint University of Excellence. During his tenure he became recognized as an evangelist for Flash for use in distance learning. He worked tirelessly with the development team at Macromedia and earned a reputation as a problem solver. In 2003 he presented "Selling the Value of In-House Design" to over 10,000 attendees at the HOW Design conference illustrating the power of social development as a training tool. In 2004 he left Sprint and spent the next few years on the launch teams of start-ups as a partner consultant. Over those 5 years, he's spent thousands of hours researching technology business trends and he now applies that accumulated knowledge to his role as a the founding partner in Rawk Media. Doug regularly speaks at national events as a technology futurist and is the Social Media for Kansas City Examiner expert, the pioneer of the community give back ‘2.0 for the Job Seeker'.