JEREMIAH LOWIN ’00: The Search for Life’s Work

At the GCDS Centennial Commencement on June 4, the Class of 2026 received an unexpected piece of wisdom drawn from a clinically depressed robot named Marvin and a battered paperback copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

JEREMIAH LOWIN ’00, Commencement Speaker, founder and CEO of Prefect Technologies, and a GCDS lifer, took the graduates back to a sixth-grade classroom and the annual public speaking competition, known today as a Tiger Talk. While his classmates came with Hamlet, Atticus Finch, and Holden Caulfield, he arrived prepared to recite from his favorite book, a 1978 British science fiction parody. He opened his mouth, and forgot every single word. After asking for line after line, he had no choice but to sit down.

“Thankfully,” he told the graduates with a chuckle, “that total and embarrassing failure has in no way haunted me for the last 30 years.”

Returning to the passage that had eluded him decades earlier, he described how a supercomputer named Deep Thought is asked to calculate the answer to “the great question of life, the universe, and everything.” After seven and a half million years, it produces an answer: 42. The catch, the computer explains, is that nobody actually understands the question.

That paradox, he said, became a defining theme of his life. He traced it to a pivotal moment in college, when he encountered two contradictory claims about whether stock markets are “normally distributed.” His statistics professor said one thing; a book by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot said another. Rather than accept the contradiction, he felt a burning need to get to the bottom of it. He taught himself the software, built the models, and churned through the data until he proved the book correct and his professor wrong.

When he brought his findings to her, she conceded the point, but explained that her answer was “right enough for an introduction to statistics.” It was, he recalled, the first time he saw that an answer’s validity could depend entirely on the question being asked. Somewhere in that exploration, he began to find his own answer to the great question. That passion for exploring data and making sense of it would go on to define his entire career.

The speech then turned to mentorship and the value of failure. Years ago, when he was considering starting his own company, he sought advice from his former boss, Brian Olson, the parent of two GCDS students. Brian agreed to invest, but offered a memorably unsentimental pep talk: “Most startups fail. But yours will probably also fail.”

Brian’s real point, however, was about the kind of failure that matters. He wanted to see original mistakes—not the predictable errors visible in any other company, but new ones. “No one doing anything interesting gets it right on the first try,” Lowin explained. “An original mistake is proof that you’re innovating. And if you make enough original mistakes, they’ll map out a path to an original success.”

He built Prefect on that idea, naming it after a character from his favorite book and adopting Marvin the robot as its mascot. New employees still receive a copy of the book so they understand the company’s values: curiosity, optimism, and original mistakes.

The story came full circle through another GCDS connection: investor and podcaster Patrick O’Shaughnessy ’00, a former Country Day student who, as a sixth grader, had watched Lowin fail to recite that very book. O’Shaughnessy later gave a name to the lifelong quest Lowin had been describing—your life’s work—and observed that the people who do the most interesting things are those so consumed by it that it governs almost everything they do.

In closing, Lowin told students they may not yet have found their question or answer, he acknowledged, and when they do, they may struggle to explain it any better than the number 42.

“You’re not meant to explain it. You’re meant to chase it.” And they won’t chase it alone, they’ll find their own version of Brian and Patrick, including the GCDS friends who will help turn original mistakes into original successes.

He left them with the two words printed in large, friendly letters on the cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Don’t panic.”