Author Description

In my book, How I Made the Web World Wide, I chronicle my journey as co-founder of Digital Island, a pioneering Internet infrastructure startup launched in 1996. With a bold vision, our team raised $779 million to forge a global telecommunications network that transformed worldwide connectivity and ignited a financial revolution. In swift succession, this framework enabled the most transformative event in human history: the globalization of eCommerce. This marked the pivotal moment in human history when, for the first time, people could exchange money securely and instantly across borders globally, without physical presence, and without barriers. It immediately transformed humanity from a collection of independent financial civilizations into a single, synchronized, self-aware economic species. The world’s economy was fundamentally reset with the speed of a DNS update. Digital Island’s network achieved unprecedented speed and scale, affecting billions simultaneously. It democratized opportunity and wealth creation more broadly and quickly than any prior event. It unified all prior revolutions into a single, instantaneous, planetary economic organism. The world’s commerce, trade, finance, distribution, education, human communications, and the many other Internet-centric applications were measurably, globally, and irreversibly different after the Digital Island network went live.