People Who Shaped Me

The most radical thing you can do in Silicon Valley is know when enough is enough. Craig Newmark chose human dignity over extraction, and built a thirty-year proof that surveillance capitalism was always a choice, not an inevitability.

How a 1969 photo of an MIT engineer standing next to stacks of Apollo code fundamentally changed how I think about error handling, testing, and what it means to build systems that actually matter

Master of speculative fiction who predicted AI consciousness dilemmas, explored the dark side of technology, and never pulled his punches

How I accidentally discovered my grandfather was a country music badass who helped create the Bakersfield Sound

How David Hockney turned the humble fax machine into an artistic medium, participating in the 1989 São Paulo Biennial entirely by transmitting 144-sheet compositions across phone lines

How a fictional teenage inventor from 1910 became the secret influence behind Silicon Valley, and why my grandfather's old hardback copies shaped my love of technology

How Dan inspired and educated me.