The Stanford Speech

I was twelve years old when I watched the commencement address the founder of Apple gave at Stanford. A kid that age is not supposed to sit through a graduation speech. I sat through it twice.

One line did it. You can only connect the dots looking backwards. He was saying that the things that look random while they are happening turn out to be load-bearing, and that the structure only becomes visible from the far side of it. At twelve I could not have explained why that landed the way it did. I only knew it was the truest thing anybody had said to me.

After that I became a hawk for connections. Every book, every failure, every person I met went into a file as a dot that would matter later. People thought that was a strange way to move through the world and they said so. My parents included, and they were not wrong to say it, because a twelve-year-old talking about the hidden architecture of his own life is a genuinely odd thing to have at the dinner table. They let me be odd about it anyway.

Twenty years later I am building a platform and the platform is literally called Dots. I did not name it after the speech on purpose. I named it that because it is the only word that has ever described what I actually do, which is watch for the connection nobody else has made yet. I am not going to pretend I have turned around and seen the whole picture. The line got into me at twelve and never left, and I have spent every year since collecting dots I could not explain yet.