History Is Made by a Series of Accidents I first encountered the Lenovo lab in 1983. There were only five or six people, and the atmosphere felt bleak. I believed I was fortunate to have the chance to pursue my dream in the US. The company was founded in 1984 three months after I left. I joined the UIUC-NCSA lab in 1987 with a similarly small group, largely because my visa status blocked me from a summer internship at Bell Labs. I paid little attention to the first client-server programs my colleagues and I wrote and gained little insight into their significance. The browser emerged four years later in 1991, built on the network we had started. I entered the Microsoft IE team in 1995 when it had just eight engineers. My goal was to invent an operating system, not a browser, and I missed the full surge of the World Wide Web. In 2000, I founded Kortide in China to develop Elastos, yet I entirely missed the Chinese economic boom as the Internet took off. During that same period, companies such as Tencent, Alibaba, Sohu, and Baidu—many of the major private-sector IT firms—were founded a couple year earlier or later. All of us here in the Telegram group know the stories of the launch of the Elastos SmartWeb initiative in 2017, now called the Elastos World Computer: so many dreams and setbacks, from regulatory pressure by the two superpowers to the crypto winters. Looking back, I doubt that five to ten naive youngsters could have convinced the world they were onto something so vast. Some, if not all, lacked belief in their own work—clearly, that was me, more than once. When a paradigm shift occurs, whether recognized or not, no one can halt the underlying avalanche. All we can do is get the first few rocks rolling.