2000

At fourteen, the internet bubble was bursting. Stocks tanked. Startups vanished. I barely noticed. While headlines screamed about crashes, I was elbows-deep in a home-built water-cooling setup, trying to squeeze more speed out of an old CPU. I wasn’t thinking about markets. I wasn’t chasing trends. I just wanted to make my machines run cooler. Quieter. Better. It was never about the noise — it was about control. Precision. The quiet satisfaction of bending hardware to your will.