Jason Baptiste -- the 28-year-old founder and chief marketing officer of mobile publishing company Onswipe -- has always had a great eye for design. As a student at the University of Miami, he started a software company with the goal to make spreadsheets more enjoyable. When he turned 21, he dropped out of school and moved to Silicon Valley to work on his startup. When the recession hit, Baptiste returned to finish school and walked out of his alma mater with a bachelor's degree in computer information systems.
During that time, he also wrote a book called The Ultralight Startup. The project inspired him to find a way to make his writing look good on tablets. As he started to build the software, he realized that mobile technology had a lot of business opportunity. His current company, Onswipe, was born.
He spoke with Fortune.
1. Which business or technology person do you admire most? Why?
If I had to pick one overall person who I think has influenced me in the industry the most -- I don't even know the guy super well personally -- it's [former Intuit CEO] Bill Campbell.
What he's done is influence so many leaders of our time. So you name it, from Steve Jobs and the Google (GOOG) founders to the CEO of Twitter (TWTR) Dick Costolo, he's basically instilled in them the best management practices and ways to grow a startup. He's done that with so many folks at big, successful companies, and it comes back down to the smaller startups and trickles through.
I think he's had the biggest impact on our ecosystem. He's a quiet, under-the-radar guy, but he's had probably the biggest impact. His nickname is "the coach." At one point he was on the board of both Apple (AAPL) and Google at the same time. He's been an advisor and a mentor to a ton of folks.
2. Which technology sector excites you most?
I would say mobile is the most exciting at a high level, and here's why: We have the chance to completely reinvent everything that has come before us to be, not slightly, but entirely different. Mobile is a "one foot" user interface, right? It's not that far away from your face. It's where we get to rethink the experience of everything that has come before. It's essentially putting a supercomputer in everyone's pocket. So, what's possible that wasn't possible before? We've seen things like Uber. It's the ability to actually have a car-on-demand which is going to be cheaper than a taxi. So there's a ton of new stuff that we can build now.
3. What would you do if you weren't working at your current job?
I would absolutely be a writer. This whole company started out of writing. In my mind, writing is creation. Writing is when you say, "I want to tell a story about something -- this company or this person or this event." I think it's parallel to software. Software allows people to create stories through experiences. So, I would be a writer. I've often gotten the question of, "What would you do if there were no computers?" I would have started a media company and been the first writer there.