In 2007 the computer became the phone, and the phone became everything.
Apple unveiled the iPhone in January 2007, collapsing the computer, the camera, the map, and the web into a single glass rectangle. New Horizons used Jupiter's gravity to shorten its journey to Pluto, while Dawn began its mission to Vesta and Ceres.
In 2007 the iPhone arrived and quietly ended one era and began another. Before it, the internet was something you visited, sitting down, at a desk. After it, the internet was something you carried, awake in your pocket, everywhere you went.
I did not fully grasp the scale of it at first. Almost nobody did. But within a few years, every assumption I had about how people would buy, pay, order, and connect had to be rewritten around a device you touch with one thumb.
Most of my work in the decade that followed, payments, restaurants, all of it, is downstream of that January.