The video game and personal computing revolutions hit right when I was growing up—personal computing was the new technology frontier in the late 70’s and early 80’s. And it wasn’t just Apple and the IBM PC, but hundreds of new companies like Commodore and Atari as well. I taught myself to program out of a book called “Instant Freeze-Dried BASIC” at age 10, and got my first computer (a TRS-80 Color Computer—look it up!) at age 12.

Undoubtedly the most exciting project was the original Mosaic web browser in ’92–’93—and the biggest challenge was getting anyone to take it seriously back then. At the time, everyone thought the interactive future would be delivered as “interactive television” by huge companies, not as the Internet by startups.

The most exciting thing is the huge unexplored frontier of applications and services that programmers and entrepreneurs are able to explore—the Internet has unleashed creativity at a level that I don’t think we’ve ever seen before. My biggest concern is the principle of unintended consequences—we don’t always know the implications of what we do, such as the Internet being used by governments to run a new level of surveillance on citizens.

The rate of change—the most important thing to learn is how to learn—how to flexibly adapt to changes in the specific technologies, and how to keep an open mind on the new opportunities and possibilities as you move through your career.

Go as deep as you possibly can on understanding how technology is created, and then complement with learning how business works.

No, but we advance the standard of living of people through economic growth, and most economic growth throughout history has come from technology—so that’s as good as it gets.