Creativity Quote by Thomas Dolby

The line lands like a shrug that’s hiding a plot twist: a pop musician famous for synthesizers and sci-fi sheen accidentally wanders into the actual future and decides to stay. Dolby frames his Silicon Valley leap as almost passive, a “year or two” sabbatical that turns into a corporate second act. That rhetorical move matters. By casting the pivot as something that happened to him (“one thing led to another”), he softens ambition into happenstance, the classic humblebrag of tech culture before humblebragging had a name.

The subtext is that the boundary between art and industry was already dissolving in the early 90s, especially for someone like Dolby, whose music was built from circuitry, software, and studio experimentation. For him, “refresh my batteries” isn’t just a musician’s burnout metaphor; it’s an on-brand piece of techno-wordplay that quietly suggests he was always fluent in the language of devices. He wasn’t betraying music so much as following its tools to their source.

Context does a lot of work here. The early 90s Valley was shifting from hardware mystique to software scale, from hobbyist tinkering to IPO mythology. Dolby’s casual “formed a company” compresses a huge cultural moment: creativity becoming a venture, experimentation becoming product. The final phrase, “ended up doing pretty well,” is deliberately understated, a musician’s phrasing for what Silicon Valley would call traction. It’s a tidy anecdote, but it’s also a snapshot of an era when being “in high tech” felt like joining the backstage crew of tomorrow.