Happy birthday, Paginated Report Bear!

Paginated Report Bear turns 1 year old today. He wasn’t expected to last more than a few weeks.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Paginated Report Bear, my friend Chris Webb described him as follows – “Well, he’s the breakout social media star of 2019, a furry YouTube sensation whose incisive interviews of members of the Power BI development team have become renowned for their deep technical content and insights into the Power BI roadmap. If you’re not watching his videos on YouTube, you’re missing out.”

If you watch the very first video that “Padgie” did 1 year ago today, Chris’s description seems EXTREMELY generous. The production quality was very low, and Mr. Matthew (my son) couldn’t even say “Paginated Reports”. Why even do videos with a bear in the first place? You see, my son had for some time wanted to do a YouTube video series with me where his stuffed animals would be included. They had been granted various personalities and voices throughout the years by yours truly, and these characteristics have carried over to the videos. I decided to rename “Mickey” to “Paginated Report Bear” because he was the lovable but dumb one, and I thought the name sounded ridiculous. And since my (naïve) assumption was we’d do a few of these videos during my vacation, and my son would get tired of doing them, that would be that. And that almost happened – there wasn’t any videos for a month from December to January, and I figured that was the end of it.

Then something strange happened – not only did my son want to do more, but some members of the Power BI community seemed to actually ENJOY the videos. He was featured on Guy in a Cube, he was mentioned on the BiFocal podcast, and he was a hit at the MVP Conference in March (he even got an MVP pin!). It was then that we decided to have him start interviewing members of the product team, starting with Lukasz back in April, and the rest is history.

But the biggest achievement of Paginated Report Bear is the one he’s taught my kids as they’ve watched their dad carry a cheap stuffed bear purchased from EBay to conferences across the country just so people can take a selfie with him – you can do something different, or be different, and be successful in your career and in life. That means a lot, and shows the broad Power BI community can have an impact outside of the day to day product details.