It's been 15 years since Steve Jobs passed. It's hard to overstate how much of an impact he had on my life. My childhood on a remote tropical island was in many ways idyllic, but also extremely sheltered and information-poor. That is, until my family bought a PowerBook Duo 230, the first computer I fell in love with. I somehow found a copy of The Internet Yellow Pages (back then you could fit the internet in a book); with that, a copy of Lynx, and my trusty 33.6k modem, a portal opened into an expansive and exciting world filled with anarchy and smut (anyone remember Bianca's Smut Shack and the Anarchist's Cookbook?!) This ignited a lifelong Apple obsession. Other kids followed sports; I had my Apple rumor sites, MacWEEK magazines, and The Mac Bathroom Reader. For my eighth grade graduation, I asked for a trip to the 1999 Macworld Expo at the Javits Center in Manhattan. The day of the Jobs keynote, we awoke at 4 AM and took a bus into the city from our shitty motel in New Jersey. We queued for 5 hours, along with hundreds of others, to get into the keynote. In those days Apple was not the ~$5T juggernaut it is today: it was a sub-$10B company, not long removed from near-bankruptcy. Steve Jobs had been back at the helm for 2 years in a last-ditch effort to turn things around, but it was anyone's guess as to whether he'd pull it off. Apple had nothing to lose. It showed. This was a far cry from the slickly produced, overly polished keynotes of the Tim Cook era; the 1999 keynote was a live production, full of vim and vigor. Noah Wyle, who had played Jobs in the made-for-TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, opened the keynote as Jobs, before introducing the real Steve Jobs to thunderous applause. Apple introduced the very first tangerine, candy-colored clamshell iBook (their first product with Wi-Fi, which Apple called AirPort). Jobs pulled out a hula hoop to show there were no wires; Phil Schiller leapt off a 30-foot ledge onto a waiting bed, iBook in hand, an attached accelerometer streaming data live to the screen. I was enthralled. Steve Jobs taught me that at its best, technology makes us more human, not less. That it can expand our potential, not diminish it. That a small group of passionate, nerdy humans who like to tinker in garage workshops can build something that can alter the course of history. And while it took me a couple of decades with many detours to find my path, it was those early, transformative encounters that ultimately led me to San Francisco and the magical land of startups. Rest in peace, Steve. May your memory be a blessing.