Speaker unverified: belief

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…You're 11 or 12, at that point you know that you want to go into the technical field, or programming, or computer science. Did that ever deviate or was that pretty much like laser focus from that point forward. I had this real embarrassing phase where I was trying to choose between—do I want to be Bill Gates or do I want to be Kenny G? I had a saxophone. I was playing a lot of just corny contemporary jazz music. Luckily the computer stuff won out at some point. After that, I didn't deviate. That was 100% what I wanted to do. I had a ton of fun just doing stuff in the 90s on my computer, a lot of support around me. In one way, I think I had the world heavyweight champion of childhood scene. It was really good, really advantageous. I also had some hardships. My dad died when I was pretty young. I was in high school. For me that was a huge wakeup call, sometimes things get real. No one’s going to swoop in to save you. You have to learn how to survive and make it through tough things on your own. I got almost kind of the perfect mix of hardship, encouragement, and privilege in a way. By the time I left to go to college, I felt pretty ready to take whatever the world's going to throw at me and also pretty far ahead of the curve in terms of knowing what I wanted to do. There's never a question of what major do I want to have? What do I want to do after I graduate? I was always 100% certain what I wanted. I'm sure that tragic death in the family also forces a lot of early maturity. You have to take on more responsibility or at least think about the broader context around your life than just yourself earlier than you otherwise would have.…

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