“It lets us travel the way a child travels…round and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”

—Don Draper, pitching the Kodak Carousel on Mad Men.

I remember playing with the yellow plastic boxes, and my father saying, “Don’t put your paws all over the slides.” I used to hold the squares up to the bedroom window to see tiny pictures of monkeys and babies. They weren’t that exciting, but in those days telly didn’t start until 3 o’clock.

Zambia was mine. My younger sisters were born in Limerick, but I was born in the town of Mansa, Luapula Province, Zambia, Africa, The World, The Universe. I had no memories of the place, and no real curiosity about it, but it was exotic and scary in a lions-and-tigers kind of way, and at eight you’ll use whatever might make you special. I liked to tell people I was born in Africa, in that hair-twirling way of small girls who want your attention.

“And I was on an aeroplane, and on the way home from Africa I got sick out the window,” I remember announcing in class one day. One of the boys said that the windows on aeroplanes didn’t open, so it wasn’t true. I would be 16 before I got on a plane again, and none of the other kids had been on one at all, but his challenge put a stop to my boasting. It still stings. (Not long ago my mother told me that yes, I’d had some bad water on a stopover in Ethiopia, and vomited the whole way back—but not out the window.)

My mother was 20 and my father 24, and they were a few days married when they went from Ireland to Zambia to start their teaching careers. It wasn’t a completely unusual choice. Ireland has a strong bond with Africa through a shared colonial history and decades of Catholic mission and relief work. In the late 60s and 70s, the newly-independent African nations were offering contracts for foreign engineers, doctors, and teachers, just at the time that the first Irish generation to get free secondary schooling were coming out of college with their first-in-the-family degrees. The bolder ones were glad to sign up for a three-year adventure.

My parents weren’t the only young couple on that long journey heading out on one of those contracts. They watched the other passengers to see who stayed with them past Rome, past Addis Ababa, past Nairobi, and on to Lusaka. A girl with a shiny new wedding ring turned to my mother on the last leg, weeping, and asked her “Do you miss your mammy too?” They are still friends with Esther today.

Esther’s baby, Danielle, was born a month before me. She was Town Mouse and I was Bush Mouse. I was the first white baby born in the Mansa clinic, 18 months after they arrived, and my mother didn’t see a doctor until late in her labour, when we were both troubled. Afterwards, she washed in a pitch-dark bathroom and then discovered next morning that it was thick with flies and filthy; it made her sick. She remembers the local women laughing at her mottled, funny-looking baby, but says she didn’t mind.

We didn’t have many photos from Zambia in our house in Limerick—a few square, white-bordered prints of leopards, my christening, and the gleaming young men on the football team at St. Clement’s Secondary School, where my father taught. But there were dozens and dozens of photos of my younger sisters, born six and nine years later, and I decided—with more logic than bitterness—that this was because they were so clearly cute, while I had brown hair and glasses.

It wasn’t until a trip home last September that I remembered the yellow boxes of slides. My parents hadn’t owned a slide projector, and we had never seen them properly. Over the years their pictures had faded first into mystery and then into oblivion. At some point they had been shunted up to the attic. My mother wasn’t sure about letting me have them—I’m known to lose things—but I persuaded my sister to climb up to the attic and pass them down to me, in a precarious operation that had the three of us yelping “Oh Jesus! Watch it!”

I brought the slides back to San Francisco and eventually got round to shipping them to a scanning service down the road in Burlingame. They sent them on to Mumbai, where Indian workers would scan each slide by hand and color-correct them for my digital approval, then return them to San Francisco along with a DVD copy of their contents.

We are moving, says my friend Richard, from a world of things to a world of flows. The Zambia slides had a long journey in years and miles. They were carried across four continents and three decades, encased in yellow plastic boxes, in suitcases, in bubble wrap and styrofoam peanuts, in cardboard boxes and packing tape, until one day their atoms were reborn as bits and their hidden stories began to flow.

I opened the links on my computer at work. There was the baby that was once me—smiling, pondering, sleeping, bawling, floating. There were my parents, hip and beautiful and improbably young, wearing bright colors. And there was Zambia, dusty, sunny, with new brick buildings and vivid red bushes.

These were my blurred stories but not my memories, and I wished that I were discovering them with my mother and father instead of sitting alone 5,000 miles away. Digital photos don’t live anywhere. There’s no ritual of setting up the projector and dimming the lights. You’re not passing loose photos across a kitchen table, or squeezing in beside someone to turn the pages of an album. Loosed on the web, these photos seemed ephemeral and indestructible, detached and yet achingly intimate, years ago and yesterday.

I sent the links to my sister in Canada and to my friends at work, because I wanted the photos seen. How can you not bite your lip at the sight of a tiny baby, wet and kicking after a basin-bath, even if that baby is—somehow—yourself?

As I said, I was six when my sister was born, and as an almost-only child I believed myself to be self-sufficient. I remember vividly the night I learned to read, some time before I was four. My mother was re-reading an Enid Blyton story about Santa Claus getting stuck in the chimney of a factory. I was curled under her arm, sucking my thumb and imbibing the bliss of a story, and then there was a moment when the words on the page unscrambled, and I knew by the shape of them what each one said. It was fabulously exciting. From now on, I could read myself a story any time I wanted, forever and ever. It was my emancipation.

That’s what I remember—being a good girl, being the big sister, being able to tie my own shoes and put on my pyjamas, being able to learn off my spellings and read my own bedtime stories. All my life, I have shrunk from needing things from others. Yet these Zambia photos tell a different story, one that makes my throat swell. I wasn’t an independent little creature. I was a baby who was swaddled and held—in the crook of my father’s arm, on my mother’s hip, on their laps and shoulders, in lakes and on land—and I accepted it with grace and satisfaction. My parents didn’t have a Baby Bjorn to keep their hands free for their iPhones. Even though the Zambian babies were carried in wraps, it hadn’t occurred to my parents to do the same. They brought me everywhere—on safari in the back of a friend’s tiny Beetle, to parties with their childless friends, backpacking through Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania. We were a trio.

This year, 2010, my parents will be married forty years, and my mother will turn sixty. I no longer gaze up at them daily with total dependence and devotion, but now I know how much I once did. And through their old photos I’ve learned to read another love story.

If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective—and mine is painfully so—can have a less respect for his present identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome; a notorious ***; addicted to ****: averse from counsel, neither taking it, nor offering it;—*** besides; a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not; I subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou canst be willing to lay at his door—but for the child Elia—that “other me,” there, in the back-ground—I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master—with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher medicaments. I can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ’s, and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the least colour of falsehood.—God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated.—I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was—how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful! From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself,—and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being!

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite?

—Charles Lamb, ”New Year’s Eve,” 1821

Tomorrow Patrick comes to stay. My couch has missed him, and so have I. He’s one of my favorite people in the whole wide world, and though both our worlds are wide, we share a hometown. I grew up in Limerick in the 1980s, and he grew up there in the 2000s.

Among many other things—student, hacker, writer, pilot, traveler—Patrick is an entrepreneur. He was 17 when he started to write software that would make life easier for middle-aged eBay sellers, and 19 when he sold it. Paul Graham, whose essays I’ve long admired, was his mentor and investor through his Silicon Valley incubator firm, Y Combinator. (I’ve wondered if that “Y” indicates the chromosome requirements for running programs, but that’s a mean little thought.)

Since then, Patrick has gone back to college and kept up his start-up ventures, from making Wikipedia fit on an iPhone to designing payment systems for developers. Every so often he’ll tell me off-handedly that he is meeting with some improbable supporter—the president of the European Commission or some billionaire CEO. And we laugh at the ridiculousness of this world that will give you all kinds of unexpected help as long as you have the balls to try, the brains to back it up, and the belief to keep it going.

Though I work with big corporations, my favorite clients are usually founders rather than career executives. They are the artists of the business world, who see what isn’t there and bring it into existence. They are romantics.

I suppose I collect entrepreneurs. I’ve worked for start-ups, made friends with many founders, and even married a man who turned out to be one. Ten years ago, when we were deciding how much of our savings to put into his new business, my ex-husband said, “Owning stocks is betting on other people. I’d rather bet on myself than anyone else.”  I’ve never forgotten it. It wasn’t a bigger appetite for risk, it was a different definition of risk. And it was just the opposite of everything our Irish upbringing had trained us both to work for—the gold stars of a good Leaving Cert, a profession, and assumption into the Dublin elite.

Even now, it’s hard to imagine preferring to bet on myself. But Patrick would take that bet, I’m sure. It’s a confidence shared by the twenty-odd entrepreneurs I know across different fields and different countries. It sets them apart from those of us who look for the misleading signals of other people’s belief. As I got closer to start-ups in the 1990s, I noticed how many people felt more secure joining a new company with 60 employees rather than six. What the crowd thinks matters more than where the cash is going.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into an essay on enterprise—especially as Paul Graham does those so well—but I find myself listing the traits that make founders different:

They are challengers.

When I move into an apartment, there’s a period of about two weeks when I can see what could make it better. Then I get used to it, and for years that crooked mirror stays where it is. Entrepreneurs don’t get comfortable with the mediocre. They see the gaps between what is and what could be.

Sometimes, they even see gaps for other people.

Much of my consulting work involves enforcing empathy—helping clients  see the world from the perspective of other people. It’s  hard, and that’s probably why so many founders start or stick with the stuff that they themselves (and their friends) care about.  We end up with no shortage of t-shirt design companies, indie coffee shops, and mobile apps.

But some people can look beyond their own tribe to identify what people who are not at all like them might need or want. I’m thinking of Patrick with his eBay seller tools, or Cameron Sinclair building houses for and with the four billion people who are neither destitute or rich, or Liam Casey helping people dance with the chaos of the global supply chain.

They have a bias for action.

They might  play with ideas in words for a while, but before long they want to make a prototype. And then they want to move it forward. And forward again.  “That thing we were talking about last night? I mocked it up. I think it could work.”

They are connectors.

“Do you know so-and-so?” The entrepreneurs I know are constantly suggesting and making introductions—texting mid-meal to someone you “should really meet.” Karma is capital.

They can inspire others to help them.

Sometimes it’s charm, sometimes it’s force of will, sometimes storytelling. However they do it,  founders have an ability to make other people see something, believe in it and pitch in. And often, they just ask for help directly—an underrated superpower.

They define discomfort differently.

I like having someone else worry about my paycheck, even though that means it’s much smaller than an independent practitioner’s. And I like the notion of “after work”—the time for Down Dogs, bon-bons, and Mad Men.

My founder friends can tolerate a level of uncertainty that would paralyze me. They can live without material comforts (on my couch), and drive themselves like mill horses. What they can’t stand is the idea of spending their time and talent on someone else’s ideas.

They don’t need approval.

Several of my entrepreneur friends are academically brilliant—and several others struggled to pass school and couldn’t wait to get out. But none of them got hooked on hits of teacher’s praise, and they avoided a lifelong addiction to recognition from above. Their own opinions matter more to them than those of authority figures. In a strange way, I think this frees them up to ask for and listen to advice more effectively, because they’re looking for information, not confirmation.

Above all, they are relentlessly resourceful.

Paul Graham pointed this one out as the key defining trait of successful entrepreneurs. They will find ways to get around problems and get stuff done, long beyond the point where sane and well-adjusted people would abandon a project.

I feel lucky to know so many makers and doers. Life is more vivid with people who are shaping some corner of the future, however small. You get to talk about possibilities, fears, creativity, change, big choices, leadership—all the good stuff. And I know, too, that it can be lonely for founders, who must constantly project certainty even as they suffer night sweats over making payroll. For them, being able to question, worry, or even just gossip with an outsider can be a break from a consuming enterprise, and for me—well, it’s nice to feel useful.

My cellphone ring is the sound of unmet obligations.

At fourteen, I spent hours a night willingly tied to the family phone, dissecting the gossip from biology class. Now that I’m a so-called grown-up, I dread being dragged into cyberspace—that place between phones—and my subconscious isn’t subtle about acting out.  Every month or two I shed cellphones in cabs and on airplanes, and more than one client has chased me down a hallway to return a phone I’d left at a meeting. I lose the charger or just forget to plug it in. I turn the ringer to “silent” mode during yoga class and forget to switch it back for days at a time. I bought an iPod Touch but not an iPhone: on a voiceless Touch, I never have to answer, “Will you run a workshop in Tokyo?” or “Why didn’t you call me back?”

After years of this, almost none of my friends or family rings me any more, and I’m perverse enough to be a small bit disappointed. The trouble is, I do like talking to them—I just dread the picking up part, the explaining and apologizing for my latest spell of neglect. If I were an octopus, I’d spend most of my time pretending to be a coconut.

A 1.30 AM call is hard to ignore, though. Last night the sound got tangled in my dream for a few seconds, and I was confused when I stumbled out to the kitchen to answer the phone. What could have happened in Limerick? To Mum or Dad? Was this going to be the last moment of Life Before…?

It was an Oakland number, and over background noise a woman said, “Hello? Hello? Is Shawn there?”

Goddammit, lady…

“You have the wrong number,” I snapped. “And it’s 1.30 in the morning.” I could see that I’d slept through a few earlier calls.

She sounded drunk and riled. “Ma’am, I’m sorry I have a wrong number. But you should tell your man not to be givin’ out this number to women.” Another woman hooted.

I sputtered for half a second and hung up, and went back to bed and stewed. I thought about texting her some playground answers:

Whoever Shawn is, he thinks you’re busted.

If you have to make the booty calls, you’re working too hard for it.

Be sure to bring the blue pills, honey. My husband is 82.

My apartment looks out over the whole city, and mostly I watch its drama from up here—the sun going down behind Twin Peaks, the street lights and house lights coming on, the cars snaking down to the Mission bars, the moon rising. The hill I live on is so steep that a few days ago my leather sole slipped out from under me and the bruises are still contour-mapping my hip and elbow. Up here, it’s easy to stay in and skip another Saturday night out.

The week before, my upstairs neighbors had come home at half-past two and yelled and stamped for a good few hours. I tried not to catch the words of their accusations—eavesdropping is fun only with strangers—but I couldn’t sleep through it.

Now I lay sleepless again, pulled into another Saturday night story by disembodied voices. I imagined the woman who called, all done up in skimpy club gear. Youngish. Hopeful about some Shawn from the night before or the week before, a San Francisco guy with a 415 area code and a sharp hat. He gave her his number and didn’t take hers, and that meant she could believe, if she wanted to, what he’d said. That she was hot, she was beautiful, she should call him, they could go out.  And tonight he might be wondering about her, waiting for her voice on a Saturday night at 11, at midnight, at 1.30.

All night, between phone calls, she would be bright and loud and hard-edged with her girlfriends, eyeing the talent and ordering rum-and-Cokes, but while she sipped she’d wonder if he was home by now. Would he sound sleepy-sexy and happy to hear from her when he picked up—heeyyy? Would he tell her to come on over? Would he make her breakfast?

She got me instead. Poor old pet.