Perhaps the best things about writing this book have been all the interesting conversations that I’ve had with so many smart, passionate folks and the opportunity that writing has given me to reflect on all the people who have influenced me. When I told Satya Nadella, my boss at Microsoft, that I was thinking about writing a book, he didn’t hesitate to offer encouragement and support. Beyond telling me to go for it, he connected me with Greg Shaw and shared what he was learning as he finished writing his book, Hit Refresh. My colleagues at Microsoft are amazing, and I’ve learned more from them over the past few years than I believe I’ve learned in my entire life. I’ve shared many interesting conversations with Eric Horvitz, Saurabh Tiwary, XD Huang, Yuxiong He, Ranveer Chandra, Doug Burger, Jaime Teevan, Umesh Madan, Luis Vargas, Mat Velloso, and Eric Boyd that have been particularly helpful for this book. Brad Smith and the work that he and his team at Microsoft are doing on privacy, AI ethics, and access to technology means a great deal to me as an individual, and I’m glad for the conversations we’ve had and the work we’re able to do together on these important issues.
I’ve had the privilege of working with some truly amazing folks over the years, most recently with an incredible team at LinkedIn. For several of LinkedIn’s most intense years, Mohak Shroff, Bruno Connelly, Igor Perisic, Dan Grillo, Sonu Nayyar, and Alex Vauthey worked with me to build an engineering and operations team and culture that I will always love. I learned so much from each of them and can never express enough gratitude for all their hard work, sacrifice, commitment, mentorship, humor, and grace.
My colleagues on LinkedIn’s executive team were a fantastic band of brothers and sisters to be in the trenches with. Deep Nishar, with whom I worked earlier in my career at Google, was my link to LinkedIn, and was a great product partner for my first years there. David Henke, Erika Rottenberg, Mike Callahan, Shannon Brayton, Steve Sordello, Pat Wadors, and Mike Gamson cared more about one another, and about what we were trying to do together, than any team I had worked with prior. When I joined LinkedIn, I reported to David Henke for a bit and then was his peer on the executive team for a few years when he ran technical operations and I ran engineering. David is the best operations leader I’ve ever worked with (although his protégé, Bruno Connelly, is a very close second), and he taught me more about ego-less leadership, intensity, brutal honesty, and operational excellence than I’ve learned from anyone else. I’ve missed David’s company since the day he retired.
When I read the words that I’ve written in this book, I can very clearly hear Jeff Weiner’s voice and feel his influence almost everywhere. I was, and am, a pain in the ass to manage. Consequently, Jeff may not fully appreciate how much I learned from him. I’m grateful to him for his patience as a manager, his generosity with advice and help when I needed it, and for him genuinely caring about my well-being, not just for the work that I was producing. I’m glad to call him, and my other colleagues from LinkedIn, friends.
When I joined LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman was already a very big deal. I have to say that I was too intimidated to try to get to know him at first. That may be one of the biggest personal mistakes I’ve ever made. Reid is one of the smartest folks I know. Sometimes, folks as smart as Reid, who choose to think as broadly as he does, can be very difficult to connect with. Their minds move so fast, and in such peculiar ways, that simple things, like having a conversation with them, can be challenging. But Reid is also approachable, compassionate, truly thoughtful, and a sweet human being. Much of this book is influenced by Reid, partly from the many conversations that we’ve had about shaping the impact of AI so that it serves the public good, and partly from taking cues from him to try to engage in a public debate of ideas, even when that debate can be uncomfortable.
I couldn’t have written this book without my family and old friends. My mom and dad, my brother, my aunt and uncle, my cousins, and my grandparents have shaped the way that I think about the world and have always been unfailingly supportive of me and the crazy things that I’ve wanted to do. They have always had this faith in me, and that faith has been the bedrock of my confidence to try new things, and to persist when they invariably prove to be hard and frustrating. In retrospect, I don’t know why they’ve always had so much faith in me. But I’m grateful for it, and I wish that everyone, everywhere, had more of that in their lives. When folks believe in you, I think that it’s easier for you to believe in others. And that’s one virtuous cycle that the world could use more of.
As anyone who has ever read a book’s acknowledgments section knows, writing a book takes an especially heavy toll on one’s immediate family. In my case, my day job already takes quite a bit of time away from my family, and writing a book on top of that has meant many nights, weekends, and vacations spent typing away at my laptop instead of doing all the things I love doing with my family. But the thing is that this book, the hope for the future that it’s trying to encourage, and the work to earn that hope that we need to do, is the mission that my wife, Shannon, and I have been on together since 2002. She more than anyone in my life gets it. But, beyond getting it, Shannon, with her tireless desire to help other people even when it reduces her to exhaustion and tears, is the reason that I’ve kept pushing year after year, and the main reason why this book exists. She also spent many of her own precious weekend hours scrutinizing drafts of this book and providing amazingly helpful feedback. I love her very much and wonder every day how I got so lucky.
My coauthor, Greg Shaw, is one of the luckiest breaks I’ve caught in my long series of lucky breaks. When I started thinking about writing a book, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to make it happen. Putting together a few hundred pages of hopefully coherent thought seemed daunting, and I knew absolutely nothing at all about the publishing industry and how to navigate it. Greg is a pro, having been through this process several times, and in addition to being a great writing partner and editor, he helped to connect me with my agent, Jim Levine, and with my editor at Harper Business, Hollis Heimbouch, both of whom have provided thoughtful and incredibly valuable feedback that I would have been lucky and grateful to have even if this book never saw the light of day. Rebecca Raskin and the entire team at HarperCollins made the finished product so much better and the experience more fun. Greg and I have worked so well together, in fact, that both of us experienced a bit of melancholy as we drew close to the finish line. I’m already thinking about our next project, just so I can continue to spend time with Greg.
—Kevin Scott
My hometown in Cotton County, Oklahoma, is 1,313 miles from Kevin’s home in Campbell County, Virginia. Thirteen is a lucky number. You’d pass through Memphis and Nashville to get there. Yet the first time we sat down to lunch with a plate of chicken and Phaseolus lunatus, we immediately fell into a conversation about whether our families called them lima beans or butter beans. It didn’t matter, in rural America these flat little green beans are a signal we’re eating out fancy. The moment I knew a fellow Southern techie wanted to write a book about AI and rural America, I was all in. I cannot thank Kevin enough for the opportunity.
Many people informed and inspired us along the way, and most are cited in the text of this book. But I do want to thank a few who are not:
At Microsoft, Mary Snapp, Jennifer Crider, Mike Egan, and Mike Miles are leading important work to support access to rural technologies. I am incredibly appreciative of Peter Lee’s thoughtful explanation of “dropout theory” in chapter 7.
Kitty Boone at the Aspen Institute and Janet Topolsky at the Aspen Institute’s Rural Development Innovation Group provided helpful connections. My good friend David LaFuria, a partner with Lukas, LaFuria, Gutierrez & Sachs, is encyclopedic about laws and regulations surrounding rural broadband. Rob Shepardson, my friend and colleague who cofounded SS+K with Lenny Stern and Mark Kaminsky, produced a gorgeous documentary about rural values that I hope will one day be available to everyone. Special thanks to the Microsoft Library team, Kimberly Engelkes and Amy Stevenson, for their review of the manuscript and for producing the section on “citations and further reading.”
Finally, my passion for this topic was made possible thanks to both sets of grandparents from Cotton County, Oklahoma, a sparsely populated rural farming community near the Red River of Texas. Clifford and Vida Mae Farley were farmers, Vermont Shaw was a lineman for the county, and Dorothy Shaw looked after the finances of a lumberyard and the City of Walters.
—Greg Shaw