As a serial entrepreneur, I'll be the first to tell you I never really had a plan. What looks like a career — natural light beef, blockchain, classrooms on six continents, and now AI — was never driven by strategy. It was driven by curiosity, and one question at a time: how does this work, and how does it make me more useful than I was yesterday?

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It started in 1982, when I found a Tandy TRS-80 in a conference room and taught myself to use it from the manual — and I've been opening boxes like that ever since. From that machine to pioneering IBM Food Trust on the blockchain to AI today, the instinct never changed: reach for the newest tools and fix what's broken. To survive — as a business or as an individual — you have to see things differently and get ahead of change, not just react to it.

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Right now, what's next is AI, so that's where I've pointed everything. And as my mentor, Raymond T. Laurans, told me time and again: "Dare to be different."

 

I still do. Especially now.​​​

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My proudest introduction:​

"He's a Thought Leader, Visionary, Innovator, and a Misfit."

Raj Rao, GM, Industry Platforms, IBM