I was on significant financial aid, an only child, with parents who didn't have much living in North Carolina.

Anybody can be ambitious.

I look up to a lot of people, but outside of my parents, I've never really had a mentor.

You can have the best technology in the world, but if you don't have a community who wants to use it and who are excited about it, then it has no purpose.

Independent content these days can be more successful than previously because of the power of social media. However, there are still systems in place to make sure independent artists don't get as far as signed ones.

We created #BlackLivesMatter. We created a platform. We used our social media presence online in order to forward a conversation about what is taking place in black communities.

The exciting new thing, call it Internet.2, would be where links were updated and moved depending on where people click. That would give you the kind of content screening that you don't get at the moment.

What we did with 'AllThingsD', though, was very different. We weren't taking a newspaper and putting it on the web; we were creating a digital native product, and we did it inside of a very old, stuffy newspaper company at the time.