I was seventeen when I first heard the distinct noise of a 56kbps modem. It was a sound that meant something magical was about to happen. In those few moments as it connected, the world outside my room faded away, and suddenly, a new universe opened up.
I remember the feeling like it was yesterday—wonder, excitement, and awe. In an instant, I was exploring information, chatting with people halfway around the world, breaking down the barriers of geography and knowledge. I was hooked, my curiosity ignited. Hours became days as I lost myself in this digital expanse, searching, learning, discovering. It felt like the beginning of something incredible, something that would change the world forever.
Over the next few years, the internet matured, and so did I. By the time I was ready to step into the professional world, the internet was no longer just an experiment—it was a force. I found myself at Microsoft, wide-eyed and unsure of the path ahead. At my first job as an Exchange engineer, i dealt with the intricacies of enterprise communication. I had no idea how email systems worked, how businesses relied on these unseen threads of connectivity. But I was eager to learn, and the questions I didn’t have answers to fueled me forward.
For the next two decades, I lived and breathed the internet. In my career, I touched various corners of it—communications, infrastructure, identity, and then, the cloud. I was there when the cloud was in its infancy, witnessing firsthand how it transformed organizations. I was one of the early field engineers, privileged to see the future unfold before anyone else. I saw how businesses could evolve, and how technology could reshape the world as we knew it.
But through it all, there was something more—an undercurrent of something larger than what was in front of me. It was the stuff of science fiction, ideas of artificial intelligence, of machines that could think and reason, of realities built from imagination. These were things I read about in comics, watched in movies, and dreamt about as a kid. They seemed like fantasies, far-off dreams of a future we might never reach.
Yet, here we are. In just the past few years, those dreams no longer feel like fiction. They are becoming our reality. With Generative AI, Web3, Quantum Computing—the very fabric of the future is being woven right now. And it’s more extraordinary than I could have ever imagined. The possibilities stretch as far as our minds will allow.
There's another layer to this, something more human at its core. As we push the limits of technology, we’re also redefining what it means to be human. How will these advances shape our experiences, our relationships, our very sense of self? The future of technology isn’t just about machines and algorithms—it’s about the human experience that unfolds alongside it. How we connect, how we create, and how we grow as individuals and as a a society.
Rift is born from the same curiosity that captured me as a seventeen-year-old sitting in front of that buzzing modem. Rift is a space to imagine and explore the unconventional, with AI.
More importantly, it's a space to examine the human experience as this fantastical future unfolds in front of us. No idea is too bold, no question too simple.
