For the past three months, I’ve stepped away from my weekly ritual of writing before the start of the week. In that brief pause, the world of technology seemed to move at warp speed. We often say we live in an age of accelerating change. What we speak about today wasn’t even in our conversations three months ago.
Artificial intelligence has brought about a shift as profound as the arrival of the internet. Many of us have been heads-down—learning, reassessing, recruiting, building, investing—driven by excitement and the quiet fear of being left behind.
Meanwhile, life carried on with its steady rhythm. Summer turned to fall, and a new school year began. My son turned fifteen, my brother fifty, and I earned another ring around the Sequoia tree. The days quickened as the seasons changed, yet much remained familiar: the joy (and chaos) of first-day school drop-offs, the birthday toasts and stories that grow taller with age, and the laughter of friends and family who forgive our rambling speeches simply because they love us.
These contrasts—between relentless transformation and timeless relevance—offer perspective. Despite all the foundational shifts we’ve experienced, much of life remains unchanged.
In 1997, I left a Ph.D. program at Stanford because the internet was happening, and I didn’t want to miss it. I even declared that Amazon would one day kill Walmart. Twenty-eight years later, the story is far more nuanced. Retail has evolved, as it always does, through the creative reinvention and destruction of both e-commerce and brick-and-mortar companies. Amazon became a better investment, but Walmart’s stock has multiplied twentyfold, and e-commerce still represents only about thirty percent of US retail. The future rarely replaces the past; more often, it builds beside it.
Recently, Rebecca, Atticus, and I went to see Les Misérables when it toured through San Francisco. It was Atticus’ first time. Rebecca and I had both first seen it when we were his age, and he joked that he’d have to carry on the tradition. Some stories, it seems, resist the erosion of time.
Les Misérables was published in 1862, first sung in Paris in 1980, and has been running continuously in London’s West End since 1985. Perhaps it endures because it tells the timeless truths of the human condition: cruelty and compassion, injustice and mercy, love and redemption. Technology changes everything except what it means to be human.
Over these past months, as we’ve wrestled with building enduring products and companies amid tectonic change, I’ve been reminded that progress and permanence need not be opposites. Those who deny change are left behind; those who chase novelty for its own sake build what quickly fades.
To endure, we must root innovation in something timeless. There is nothing more timeless, nor more worth building for, than the human condition…Until AI learns to replace and rid us.