Whatever role you have played on this planet, you do have a choice about what is next. If “what will happen to me” or “what will ‘they’ think” influence your next decisions — you are lost, even before you have begun the Real Journey.
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After 15 years in Big Tech, I’m hanging up my hat.
When I entered the final year of my thirties last year, I decided my next decade was going to be the start of a radically different chapter in my life. I’ve done SpaceX, Meta, Google (twice). That’s enough. A few weeks ago I turned 40, so off I go. In the next few weeks I’ll share what I’m working on.
Throughout my career, I got to climb a ladder of astonishing opportunity. I grew up poor, the son of a refugee and an immigrant, became the first in my family to earn a degree. Within a few years, I was writing for the UN Secretary-General, traveling the world with Mark Zuckerberg, sitting in launch control at Cape Canaveral with Elon Musk.
Some people pursue careers like that because they enjoy the trappings of that life. Anyone who knows me knows that doesn’t drive me at all. My life’s mission has always been about figuring out how *everyone* can climb the ladder. Our world is awash with resources but riven by staggering inequality, overflowing with creativity yet mired in decaying ideas, all of us desperate to reach our full potential but constrained by problems of immense scale. It’s no surprise that people describe the future with analogies of unstoppable forces – tidal waves, meteorites, avalanches.
I reject them all. The future is not a tidal wave. We are not doomed to fail. We have agency. We can choose what kind of world we want to build.
The challenges are immense – climate crisis, economic disruption, democracies under pressure. Over 17 years, I’ve come to deeply understand leaders and institutions. Too many fail to take the future seriously, stuck in siloed thinking that condemns them to irrelevance in the most disruptive era in history.
But these things are solvable. Good leaders in the public sector, industries, communities need reinforcements.
Those of us who are at the forefront of tech must help everyone own this future. We need to stop thinking of the problems of the future as mostly technical, with technical solutions, and focus on profoundly human problems, with ambitious societal solutions. Technological progress without societal resilience won’t end with the world we hope for, and that means recognizing all our challenges are intertwined.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said: “All mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated… For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”
That’s why I’m making my next chapter all about public service. Not for a season, but for the rest of my life. I became who I was meant to be. Now I want you, your kids, our communities, our country, all countries, to become who you are meant to be.
Little kid Dex never believed he would come this far. Now I’m going to work on helping everyone else come too. Thanks to everyone who was part of my last chapter – I hope to count on your support in my next.
