The Wisdom of Age

They say a boy’s relationship with his grandfather is one of the most formative, a fact I was reminded of last week.

It was just before 5am. I was sitting at work building two prototype circuit boards. They were ARM based motherboards, built using pre-production silicon from a particularly large processor company who shall remain nameless. As I supervised the surface mount assembly line, picking and placing component after component I couldn’t help but chuckle as I thought back to something my grandfather had said to me some 17 years earlier…

Why don’t you do something with computers?

As a teenager I lived with my parents in Perth, Western Australia. Every two years or so we would head over to Zimbabwe to visit my parent’s families. It was during one such trip when I was around 16 he’d suggested such a concept.

My maternal grandfather was a fruit farmer in Zimbabwe. Apples, pears, some dairy cows and some laying hens. He spent his entire life in Africa, and it was only in his later years that he was exposed to technology we today take for granted such as satellite television. He never used a computer, a cell phone, the Internet. In fact it was a good day that there was power in order for him to hear the nightly weather forecast on the radio.

Farmer’s thrive on routine, an early start, a morning managing the farm activities, lunch, more farm work, an early dinner and off to bed. In our family the tradition was a very light dinner, normally no more than a bowl of soup. We’d congregate in the lounge room, each in our “dedicated” spot and chat about the days comings and goings. An all important moment of silence as the weather was read aloud.

I was, like any 16 year old, unsure of what exactly I wanted to do. I was fortunate enough to be living in the buzz of the first “dot com boom!” and worked part time at a hot web company that would later be bought by Australia’s one true dot com success story. So there I was, sitting on the floor, with my soup, attempting to explain to my grandparents in their 70s what exactly the Internet was…and of course that it changed — constantly. The truth was I hardly knew how it worked. I didn’t understand any of the underlying protocols at that point. All I knew was that Netscape would get you around the internet. You could basically put a string of words between some <’s and >’s and you could chat to people across the globe on IRC.

I wasn’t much interested in doing technology. Sure, I could code a little, point Photoshop but I wanted to be a business guy. And business guys did finance, were traders/brokers, did M&A. That’s what I wanted to do. So I didn’t really pay much attention to his suggestion. In fact, I refuted the idea immediately.

Yet here I was, in Silicon Valley, at 5am, 17 years later, with a pair of tweezers, placing parts for a one of a kind prototype to be shown off at a conference in San Jose the next day. As I sat there, I thought to myself — thanks Pop, but I’m not sure this is exactly what you had in mind…