As a writer and technologist, Pierre spent his life turning concepts into reality. He translated both Victor Hugo’s Hernani and his grandmother’s memoirs, la rive sud from French to English. He co-wrote Thetford Park with his father, John, and wrote about his own experiences selling to steve jobs.
Moving to the Bay Area from San Diego in the early ’80s, Pierre worked as a sales and business development executive at Sun Microsystems, Adobe Systems, and IBM. He attained an MBA (’89) and JD (’09) from attended Santa Clara University, all while working full time. Pierre currently chairs the Los Altos City Library Commission.
In April 1964, a 5-year old Pierre spent seven days fighting with his kid brother, Marc in the back seat of a fully loaded, blue two-door 1963 Rambler American hauling a trailer packed with memories and linens, as John and Therese drove down Route 66 from Montreal to the City of Orange, Orange County, California.
Pierre has also lived in Laos, Manitoba, and France in his teen years and college. His high school in Manitoba, called the “Toughest School in North America” by the Knights of Columbus, featured weekly 25-mile snowshoe runs, a 50-mile snowshoe race, and a 900-mile canoe trip from Thunder Bay, Ontario on Lake Superior to Selkirk, Manitoba, on the Red River. His first canoe trip was memorialized in the Canadian National Film Board series West, in the New Boys. He still maintains Bedard’s St. John’s Unofficial Website.
At 17, Pierre sold an essay in the San Diego Reader which was printed his first week at UC San Diego (under a pseudonym). Parlaying his sale to the Reader, he was able to get on the staff of the UCSD newspaper, the Triton Times (at the time). Before his 18th birthday, he quit and took a more socially redeeming job working at John Muir Cafeteria after a disagreement about the CIA doing research on campus and how it was being reported.
At the Muir cafeteria, he met Melissa Maxwell, worked and played indoor floor hockey with her. In the cafeteria, he excelled at frying eggs and making tuna melts. On the floor, he and Melissa were part of the championship coed team that year. Pierre was in net, Melissa played defense. You can read about Melissa here.
At UC San Diego, Pierre majored in French Literature and minored in European History and Chemistry. It was at UCSD that he translated Hernani, studying under Professor Jonathan Saville, the longtime drama critic for the San Diego Reader.
Pierre studied abroad one year as part of the University of California’s Education Abroad Program in Poitiers, France. He achieved a Diplôme d’études universitaires générales (DEUG), the equivalent to an Associate’s degree, from the Université e de Poitiers.
Factoids
Pierre’s first job after UCSD was editing the TOPGUN manual (the real TOPGUN manual before the movie came out), and subsequently wrote numerous scripts for OSHA and the US Naval Reserve.
Pierre attended Santa Clara University for almost 10 years, achieving an MBA and a JD while working full time and raising his family with Caroline, his life partner and an artist in her own right.
Mr. Bedard was once a man of action and mystery. Interviewing for the Peace Corps and CIA on the same day while at UCSD, he rejected both and decided to continue on his trajectory writing.
Pierre has met (and worked with) some amazing people – Cesar Chavez, Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, John Warnock, Chuck Geschke, Ed Zander, and more. He ate a sandwich in the near proximity of John Perry Barlow. He has seen a Coke can used by Bill Gates.
Oddly, Pierre matriculates and gets his degrees on the ‘9s, with his BA in 1979, an MBA in 1989, and a JD in 2009. He spent over 9 years in night school, learning. While not the attainment of a higher degree (MD?) he was appointed a library commissioner in 2019 for the City of Los Altos. He currently chairs the commission. You can read about his exploits by clicking here.
Pierre registered bedard.com in 1995 and can be reached at pierre @ bedard.com.