John F. Kennedy Airport, 1981. I was 11 years old, and my mom and I had just arrived from Guyana. Together, we had $34. We approached a big machine that we had never seen before and stood at bottom puzzling over the best way to get on and off it.
Later we learned that the machine was called an escalator. At that moment, looking up from the bottom of the escalator, the idea that I would one day run a technology company seemed unfathomable. In time, I would become a U.S. citizen, earn engineering degrees from Stanford, and work at IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
