Bob just received a long and impassioned letter in the mail from MIT urging him to think about his legacy and the impact his words are having in the tech community. Usually, he is so quick to brush critics off but this particular letter got him to think. “Who writes letters in 2017? This is so MIT”, he thinks, “Always trying to take the contrarian approach”.
He is amused and pleased by the attention he’s getting from his alma mater. The letter talks about MIT’s breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The MIT Media Lab, he learns, has been working on training AI algorithms by intensively exposing them to images of death and violence on Reddit.
But it’s the letter’s last paragraph that catches his full attention: His friends Bill Aulet and Yoost Bonsen are asking him to share his personal journey in a hand-written letter that is to be mailed back to the MIT Trust Center for Entrepreneurship and to the Media Lab. No emails. No tweets. No Medium. Just some good old ink on a piece of paper.
“The purpose of this exercise, write Bill and Yoost, is to take you back to your Subliminal VC speech from 2 years ago in which you shared so much passion about your journey. It is to force you to disconnect from your Silicon Valley bubble and to think really deep about who you are, how you got there and what you would want out of investors if you were an entrepreneur in today’s world”.
At first, Bob thinks this exercise is too cheesy and super easy (except the mailing part – Where the hell is the postal office located anyway?). But as he folds the letter and opens a drawer to file it, he pauses for a split second and starts reflecting. Three hours later, he grabs a piece of paper and a pen and starts bearing his soul.