Daniel Boorstin in his landmark work, The Discoverers (a detailed history of human discovery and invention), observed that many significant contributions came about because people were naive. In describing Ben Franklin’s electricity discoveries, for example, Boorstin explained:

In fact his (Franklin’s) achievement illustrated the triumph of naivete over learning. . . . His amateur and non-academic frame of mind was his greatest advantage; like many another discovering American, he saw more because he knew much less about what he was supposed to see.

Of course, Huang would work hard anyway. It is in his nature. If there is a theme to his life, it is amplification; he has executed on the same simple precepts of diligence, courage, and mastery of fundamentals again and again and again, to greater and greater effect. I was surprised to learn how much of the man he later became was present in the immigrant child arriving unaccompanied by his parents in the United States in 1973 to an environment so unconducive to flourishing that it seems a miracle he survived it. To understand Huang fully, we begin not at Denny’s restaurant, nor in the giant cathedrals of technology he later commissioned, but at this tiny rural school.

Across his life, Franklin displayed an encoded operating mode of active curiosity. Never content to just ponder, he felt compelled to observe directly, to experiment, to test and measure, to invent, to question, to figure out how the world around him worked— to chase the whirlwind. Franklin charted the Gulf Stream, identified the meteorological forces of storms, and became famous for his experiments with lightning and electricity. He established many of the terms we still use today in discussing aspects of electricity, such as “charge,” “conductor,” “electric shock,” and “battery.

As Sutskever rallied researchers to give him their best ideas, Brockman threw himself into the work of developing the right organizational culture. Some years later, Brockman would recount to me his thinking. To prepare, he read every book he could find on ambitious science and technology undertakings in US history: the transcontinental railroad, Thomas Edison’s light bulb, the early network of computers that would lay the groundwork for the modern Web. He absorbed them like religious texts, searching for hints and guidance on how to design his own endeavor.

He’d never experienced imposter syndrome. As a boy, when his school didn’t offer calculus, he taught himself. A formative experience. Usually he was more able than required. But for the first time he did not feel equal to the task. He had only a human mind, limited, fallible, trained on the flawed theories of the day. His only tools were a few flimsy degrees, some things he’d read, some hunches and convictions that over the years had solidified into fixed beliefs.