John Midgley was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. He studied computer science at the University of Toronto where he earned a B.Sc. and a Masters in Computer Vision. His first job out of school was building the search algorithms for openCola, an early peer to peer collaboration tool that was arguably 20 years ahead of its time. Not being able to afford a time machine, he busied himself by working at a string of startups and then a couple larger companies (Microsoft and Netflix). From 2011 to 2021 he worked at Netflix on Facebook integration, search, video ranking, content promotion and ended up managing the personalization organization, responsible for the systems and algorithms that construct the Netflix experience. Now that it’s 20 years later, the world may finally be ready for a new and improved version of OpenCola.