This is the third of seven essays measuring the distance between the decades of my life and the world we live in now.
The Nineties: connected
If you were alive in the nineties, you may remember the sound. The screech, the hiss, the beeps and static of a dial-up modem trying to connect to the internet. It sounded like a fax machine having an argument with a robot. And then, suddenly, silence, and you were online.
That sound was the sound of the world changing, but we didn’t know it just yet.
I spent the nineties in my twenties, starting out, trying to figure out who I was going to be. So was the country, and the world. I entered the decade as a new American citizen who had been in the country for only seven years, still sorting out which of my instincts were Indian and which were becoming American. I left the nineties a lawyer, a husband, and a father. Looking back from fifty-six, I can see that almost everything I have built since was planted in those ten years. The same is true of the world we live in now. Nearly every argument we are having in 2026, about technology, about China and India, about medicine, about whether the future will be better than the past, began as a seed in the nineties.
The Nerds Take Over
In the eighties, the nerds were at the bottom. In the nineties, they owned the building.
Nirvana made the quarterback look silly. Flannel beat the power suit. Hip-hop moved from the edges to the center of American culture and never left. And the kids who’d spent the eighties being stuffed into lockers started founding companies worth billions. Amazon was founded in 1994, selling books out of a garage outside Seattle.
Netscape went public in 1995, its stock more than doubling on the first morning of trading, and made the internet a gold rush. Google was founded in 1998 in a garage, just like Apple two decades before.
Look closely and you will find the outline of today’s economy hiding in that decade. In 1993, three engineers sat in a Denny’s in San Jose and sketched out a company called Nvidia, which made graphics chips so teenagers could play better video games. Thirty years later, those same chips became the engine of artificial intelligence, and Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies on earth. In 1992, a young engineer from Hyderabad named Satya Nadella took a job at Microsoft. Today he runs it. The nineties did not just produce new companies, but produced the people who would run the world a generation later.
In 1997, the nineties also gave us a preview of the machine age. IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion, in a six-game match. Kasparov was so stunned that he suspected a human had been secretly helping the computer. At the time, most of us treated it as a clever stunt, raw calculation dressed up as intelligence. Nearly thirty years later, machines write, reason, and diagnose, and the question is no longer whether they can beat us at our own games, but what we should let them do.
I loved this about the nineties. It was a genuine shake-up of who got to matter. The people who’d been ignored suddenly had a voice, and a lot of what we now think of as American culture was invented by people who’d been told they didn’t fit.
But every revolution eventually becomes an establishment. The outsiders of 1995 are the most powerful people of 2026. The garages became campuses, and the campuses became something closer to nation-states, with their own currencies of attention and their own foreign policies.
The Web
In 1991, a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee made his invention, the World Wide Web, available to everyone. He didn’t patent it. He didn’t try to get rich from it. In 1993, CERN, the lab where he worked, formally put the software into the public domain. He gave it away because he thought knowledge should be free.
Let’s pause for a second and think about that choice. One man could have owned the internet, and he decided it should belong to all of us. Everything that came after, the online store, the search engine, the video call, the AI chatbot, was built on something given away for free.
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He was not alone. Back in 1991, a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds posted a small operating system he had written as a hobby and invited anyone to improve it. He called it Linux. Today it runs most of the world’s servers and sits underneath billions of phones. The nineties had a generosity in their bones that we have largely forgotten.
We are relitigating that generosity right now. The biggest fight in artificial intelligence is between companies that keep their models closed and those that release them openly, and between nations that see AI as a public good and those that see it as a weapon. It is the Berners-Lee question, asked again with far higher stakes: should the most powerful tool of the age belong to a few, or to everyone?
Of course, we got a lot wrong. We thought the internet was going to be a giant library where everyone would become smarter. We didn’t realize it was also going to be a mob, a ghetto of grievances and a trash bin where we dump our frustrations.
India Wakes Up
Meanwhile, something big happened in India in 1991.
I left India in 1983. The India I remembered was the India of the License Raj, where a family might wait years for a telephone line or a scooter, and where ambition was something you filed in triplicate and then waited on.
In 1991, India was nearly broke. It had so little foreign money left that it had to fly gold out of the country as collateral for loans. It was a national embarrassment. And in that crisis, the finance minister, Manmohan Singh, delivered a budget that opened India’s economy to the world. Licenses were cut, trade opened up, and foreign companies were welcomed in. Singh, a quiet economist not known for drama, closed his speech by borrowing from Victor Hugo: no power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.
Almost everything people now say about India’s rise traces back to 1991. The software industry in Bangalore and Hyderabad. The Indian engineers who helped fix the Y2K bug at the end of the decade, and who came to America by the thousands and helped build Silicon Valley. The Indian-born CEOs running some of America’s biggest companies today.
India’s economy was worth roughly $270 billion in 1991. Today it is worth around $4 trillion and ranks among the largest in the world. A country that once rationed phone lines now runs one of the most advanced digital payment systems on the planet, where a vegetable seller in a village market takes payment by QR code. The engineers who once came to America to fix our old code are now building India’s own.
Today, the relationship between India and America has grown more complicated. The H-1B visa, the bridge that carried so many of those engineers here in the nineties, has become a political flashpoint, with a six-figure fee that was recently attached to new petitions and is now tied up in the courts. Whether America still wants India’s talent, or merely India’s market, is one of the quiet tensions of our time.
When I was a boy, India was a country people felt sorry for. By the end of the nineties, it became a country people wanted to do business with.
The World Opens for Business
India was not the only country opening its doors. The whole decade was a bet that trade would make the world richer, and maybe safer too.
In 1992, Deng Xiaoping, then eighty-seven years old, toured China’s southern boomtowns and told his country to stop worrying and get on with getting rich. The factories followed, and within a generation China had become the workshop of the world. In 1994, NAFTA tore down most of the trade barriers between America, Canada, and Mexico. In 1995, the World Trade Organization was born to referee global commerce. And on New Year’s Day 1999, eleven European countries gave up their own currencies for a new one, the euro.
The idea underneath all of it was simple: countries that trade with each other don’t go to war with each other, and a rising tide lifts all boats. For hundreds of millions of people in China, India, and Eastern Europe, the tide really did rise. For a lot of factory towns in Pennsylvania and Ohio, it went out and never came back.
That bargain is being renegotiated now. Tariffs are back. The trade agreements of the nineties have been rewritten, threatened, or simply ignored, and “supply chain” has become a national security term. The question the nineties thought it had settled, whether open borders for goods make us stronger or weaker, is wide open again.
The Seeds of the Genome
In 1990, scientists launched the Human Genome Project, a plan to read all three billion letters of human DNA. It would take thirteen years and cost around $2.7 billion. In 1996, scientists in Scotland cloned a sheep named Dolly, and when the world learned of her the following year, it panicked about the ethics of it. That same year, a new combination of HIV drugs arrived that finally turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable disease.
Put those together and you see the shape of today. We learned to read our code. We learned we could copy it. And we learned that, with enough work, even a disease that had killed millions could be tamed. That idea, that deadly diseases can become chronic ones, is the idea behind almost every biotech company I work with now.
Some of the most important seeds were planted right here in Philadelphia, though almost nobody noticed at the time. In the late nineties, at a photocopier at the University of Pennsylvania, a struggling researcher named Katalin Karikó struck up a conversation with an immunologist named Drew Weissman. Their unglamorous, underfunded work on messenger RNA became, two decades later, the foundation of the COVID-19 vaccines and earned them the Nobel Prize. In 1999, Carl June arrived at Penn, and his work became CAR-T, a therapy that reprograms a patient’s own immune cells to hunt cancer.
The decade also taught a harder lesson. In 1999, an eighteen-year-old named Jesse Gelsinger died in a gene therapy trial at Penn. The field nearly collapsed. It took years of humility, better science, and stricter ethics to bring it back. Those of us who invest in this work will never forget him. Progress in medicine is not a straight line, but a long road with graves along the side.
But look at where that road has led. Reading a human genome, which once took thirteen years and billions of dollars, now costs a few hundred dollars and takes about a day. The first CRISPR-based treatment, for sickle cell disease, has been approved. HIV, which killed so many of my generation’s friends and heroes, can now be prevented with a single injection twice a year. When I sit with founders through my venture and private equity platforms, I am often sitting with the grandchildren of the nineties’ scientific bets.
Forgotten Good News
The world changed in the nineties. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and hundreds of millions of people got a chance at freedom. Nelson Mandela walked out of prison in 1990 and became South Africa’s president four years later, without a civil war. In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to decades of killing in Northern Ireland. Crime in American cities dropped sharply. By the end of the decade, the federal government was running a budget surplus, something that sounds like science fiction today, when the national debt is well past $40 trillion.
Yet the same president who balanced the budget was impeached by the House in December 1998, for lying under oath about an affair with a White House intern. The Senate acquitted him two months later. Whatever you thought of Bill Clinton’s conduct, or of the Republicans who pursued him, the episode was a preview of politics as permanent war, where scandal becomes strategy and every disagreement becomes a referendum on the other side’s legitimacy. We have been living in that era ever since.
Of course, there were horrors too. Rwanda, in 1994, was a genocide the world watched and did nothing to stop. A year later came Srebrenica, in the heart of Europe. We should never forget either.
Some of the horrors were homegrown. In April 1995, a decorated Army veteran parked a truck bomb outside the federal building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people, including 19 children. It was the deadliest act of terrorism on American soil until then, and it was committed by an American. Four years later, two teenagers walked into Columbine High School in Colorado and murdered twelve classmates and a teacher. At the time, it felt unthinkable. Today, our children practice lockdown drills the way my generation practiced fire drills.
And some of the decade’s decisions, loud and quiet, are echoing now. The nineties opened with a war. In early 1991, an American-led coalition drove Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait in about six weeks. It was the first war Americans watched live on CNN, with green night-vision footage of missiles streaking over Baghdad. It looked quick, clean, and decisive. It was none of those things in the long run. The no-fly zones, the sanctions, the 2003 invasion and the years of occupation that followed: in one form or another, America has been entangled in Iraq for more than three decades.
But the nineties were, for many people, a decade of peace, growth, and hope. Maybe too much hope.
The Years That Compounded
Personally, the nineties were extraordinarily good to me.
I graduated from law school in 1996, the same year the HIV cocktail arrived and Dolly was born. In 1997, I married Pamela. And in 1999, as the world counted down to Y2K, our daughter Madison was born.
The late nineties gave me a burst of good fortune in the stock market from which I am still benefiting. In 1999, Fidelity’s Focus magazine put me on its cover for being lucky with margin investing. For a kid who had arrived from India sixteen years earlier, this felt less like an achievement and more like a clerical error in my favor.
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Economists like to talk about compounding: a small advantage, given time, grows into something enormous. That is true of more than money. The relationships I made, the habits I formed, the confidence I gained in those years have all compounded. Much of what I have been able to do since, in business and in civic life, sits on foundations poured between 1996 and 1999.
I worked hard in those years, but I would be lying if I said the fruits came only from my labor. I was a young man with a law degree in the longest economic expansion America had yet seen, in a country that was generous to immigrants, at a moment when the whole world seemed to be opening its doors. A great deal of what looked like my success was a rising tide.
That is why the most important thing the nineties gave me was not the cover or the career, but Madison. Fifteen years after she was born, she and I co-founded the Germination Project together, a bet on the young people of Philadelphia. We named it for seeds because we both understood the lessons of the nineties: what you plant matters less than how long you are willing to wait for it.
Many of the young people we work with today are not growing up on the same rising tide. Housing, education, and the first rungs of a career all cost far more than they did when I was starting out. If my generation’s good fortune was partly an accident of timing, then we owe something to the generation whose timing has been less kind. One of Germination Project’s initiatives, The Ten Program, is, in part, my attempt to pay forward a decade that was very generous to me.
Then and Now
What did the nineties give us that we’ve lost? Optimism. People really believed that history was over, that democracy and free markets had won, and that the internet would bring us together. That confidence looks naive now. But I miss it. A country that believes the future will be better is a country willing to build it.
What did we gain? Nearly everything the nineties promised, just in stranger forms than we expected. The web is everywhere. India and China are two of the world’s great economies. The genome is read, and now it can be edited. The nerds do rule the world, for better and sometimes for worse.
At the end of the nineties, investors poured money into anything with “.com” in its name. In March 2000, the bubble burst, and the Nasdaq lost most of its value over the next two years. But the internet was real. Today, money is pouring into artificial intelligence with the same feverish energy. I suspect history will judge it the same way: a lot of foolishness on the surface, and something world-changing underneath.
Signs were there
The nineties ended with the whole world worried that computers would crash at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999. Y2K.
Spoiler alert: they didn’t.
We celebrated and went to bed, thinking the real danger had passed. We were wrong about where the danger was.
But we were warned. The warnings came earlier, and we mostly tuned them out. In February 1993, a truck bomb exploded in the garage beneath the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand. The towers stood, and we moved on. In August 1998, a group most Americans had never heard of, al-Qaeda, bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania within minutes of each other, killing more than two hundred people, most of them Africans. We read the headlines and turned the page.
The signal was there. We just didn’t make the connection.
Next: The 2000s.