It was both sad and enlightening to (virtually) attend a memorial honoring the former Language Technologies Institute director and founder Jaime Carbonell, who untimely passed away one year ago. Jaime started working on NLP and machine translation when very few people believed these tasks were doable. It was a risky move, which required a lot of courage, foresight, energy, not to mention scientific, and organizational talent. He had it all and he had a huge impact on the field as a scientist, advisor, and a leader of an influential language-research institution. I had very few personal interactions with Jaime, but my life was greatly impacted by the institute that Jaime created and that ventured to take an old dude like myself aboard. I hope we, all the former and current students, can become technology and thought leaders Jaime wanted us to be.