You Are Not Late
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Domains. Google. Facebook. Pinterest. Uber. Bitcoins. It's so easy to feel like you JUST missed the wave. While you look back with anxiety at the wave you missed, you increase your odds of missing the next wave headed straight towards you. And there are always more waves. I had to learn this the hard way, after many missed waves and a lot of anxiety. So now I do what the article says: try to remind myself that the web's best days are ahead of it and there is likely more opportunity now - today! - than ever before. Calm down, take a deep breath and look to the future. Whether it's true or not, who knows, I guess time will tell, but it definitely helps keep me sane.
Why not just stop everything you're doing now and invest in ethereum?
What would be really interesting is to calculate some kind of first derivative of a wave so as to know what the optimal risk/reward tradeoff is.
Or perhaps to know what the density of false to true waves are. For example I imagine everyone knew about the potential opportunities during the gold rush. What can we say about the potential opportunities now?
For the first time in human history almost everyone on earth is instantly connected. This changes everything. Sometimes I'll just sit and think for hours about how different this makes the world we live in. We're playing by a completely new set of rules -- we're playing a completely new game, and even the most innovative people on earth are just barely starting to make sense of it all.
I think we're barely even scratching the surface of what's possible and what is to come.
It's not as obvious as you would think - consider any of the great companies of the past 10 or so years. If they had never been founded, it probably wouldn't be painfully obvious that we need them. It only becomes obvious in retrospect that we were actually in dire need the whole time.
Or look around the room you're in. What will change under the circumstances where everyone is instantly connected to each other and simultaneously to the largest data store the world has ever none? I can imagine ways that almost everything in the room I'm in now will be different. Most won't be good startup ideas, but I would venture a guess that some would.
We're all treading on very fresh ground. This is only the beginning.
It's a good sentiment, because there still is tons of stuff out there still waiting. And not going out there and doing things is a sure way to not get s hit. But it's certainly more crowded and expectations seem a lot higher these days.
The problem is that most people haven't even heard of these fields, and the ones that have generally aren't that interested. And they very well may be right to not care. In retrospect, it's obvious that the internet was a huge deal, but in the 80s it was entirely possible to be skeptical of whether the average person had much use for accessing other people's computers.
My recommendation is therefore to research the various things happening at the fringe of modern technology, and see what catches your eye. There are great strides to be made in a variety of fields, and one or more of them might turn out to be important. At the very least, it'll be fun.
You just have to find the areas that are still new enough that an amateur can be an expert. Nate Silver refers to this as finding "where the water level is low".
But here are some other things to think about.
The availability of this cheap, ubiquitous networking technology is intimately linked to the availability of extraordinarily cheap energy from carbon-based fuels as well as cheap manufacturing in various emerging markets. How many more years of that do we have? Let's not forget too that the planet keeps warming up in spite of us.
Next, there are plenty of folks out there who seem keen on changing this giant network into a tiered shopping-plex. All of this optimism about the future is implicitly dependent on a neutral network. Is there anyone on this forum who isn't gravely concerned about the damage that will be done to free enterprise if network neutrality (in the most generic sense) is lost?
Finally, there is a solution space to consider here. All of the incredible dev that has been possibly in the last few years has been made possible because the barriers to entry have been brought down by things like online tutorials, IDEs, high-level languages, and object-oriented frameworks. It might be the case that there are is a limiting number of interesting problems that can be solved without the need for more complex technical work, which might proceed at a far slower pace than we've becoming accustomed to.
An inspiring little feel good article here for those 16 hour days when you just hit your head against the wall. Or for when you need a little inspiration.
Author is right - even in 2025 so many products will have been invented today and tomorrow. Does anyone really think Snapchat will be around in 10 years? The Internet is still in its infancy. Sure, we can communicate with multimedia and watch streaming video but think of the myriad of problems and challenges facing modern day society? Endless and endless opportunity. From biotech, hardware and sensors, energy, communication, health care, VR, AI, machine learning, etc. - all very, very early problems to work on. Each of which will create dozens of profitable and dynamic technology companies.
We have to work on the future and use the amazing platforms currently in place to make something that lasts and makes an impact. I remember 5 years ago what a royal pita it was to setup a physical webserver + app server. Nightmare. Now, it happens in a click. The platforms are getting better in better for entrepreneurs to build on top of them.
This is exciting and should be exciting for anyone and everyone who has a passion to build something. And the future is not 20 chat apps, 20 youtube's, or 20 e-commerce sites selling subscription underwear. The future is wild ideas, things that seem strange and things that don't even seem possible today. But seemingly impossible ideas on the surface today are the ideas that leave a mark in the future.
Let's get nuts.
It's called Solarversia, and it's about a game played in Virtual Reality by 100m people in the year 2020. I'm going to publish it on the same day that Oculus Rift goes on sale to the public, and plan to make the game for real by using the profits from the book / film to form a company (the same one mentioned in the book). My entire marketing plan is based around the book and my lofty (naive / innocent / stupid) aim is to create "the" VR app, or at least one of the VR apps that everyone knows and loves.
It's the first time in my life (I'm 38) that I feel like I'm ahead of the curve on something. Exciting times.
I love the idea of a game being deliberately based on a book about that exact game. I'll buy the book, and back the game.
I assume I'll also need to buy an Oculus Rift at that point...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/009...
Best of luck, man.
"Hunger Games meets Ready Player One"
(but someone told me it work better using Hitchhiker's Guide as more people know it.)
(Fortunately I also did one of Autodesk's early products, and got pre-IPO stock because they couldn't afford to pay me. I also did the first ragdoll physics engine that worked, and made money off of that.)
In some ways, it's harder now, because there are so many people doing stuff in computing. In the 1980s, the number of people who knew how to make a big program work was quite small. Now everybody can do that. The few people who knew anything about AI had been to Stanford, MIT, or CMU. Now everybody serious takes machine learning class, and you can download good code for it.
There's plenty of opportunity to make money out there, but much of what people are working on is, well, pretty banal. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads. This sucks." - Jeffery Hammerbacher, Facebook.
Here's an opportunity to think about. Replace Facebook, and all the various messaging services and streaming video services, with a pay service that costs about $1 a month, with no ads. Computing has become so cheap that you can now undercut "free with ads" on price. Think of a social network as a package like Wordpress - host it anywhere, it talks to everybody else, and it just works. The authentication and spam problems are tough - solve them. There have been a few attempts at federated social networks, such as Diaspora, but the people behind them have no clue how to make them usable or popular. "Ello" is making progress on popularity, but their UI sucks and it doesn't do much. Fix all that.
If you want to do socially useful hardware, look into handheld medical devices. The medical industry tends toward big, heavy equipment designed by doctors. Dean Kamen has made a lot of money downsizing some rather clunky medical devices. Also, the UIs of systems used by doctors for medical records are awful. Doctors used to dictate medical notes. Now they have to type them, worst case on touchscreens. Make that work with voice recognition that understands not only medical terminology, but has access to the patient record for context.
Another possible area - the paperless police car. Cops hate doing paperwork. There's also a movement to make cops carry cameras. Come up with a system which takes the cop's video and audio, and fills in all the info a cop needs to book somebody. Tie the collected video and audio to that for later review if necessary. It would both help to keep cops honest and let them focus on doing their job instead of their paperwork.
So there are a few technically challenging things to do. Quit trying to find the next "Yo". That's like hoping to win the lottery.
Unfortunately, a lot of young kids are wired to look for the next Yo and or spend their energy and talents on things that don't really matter. It's crazy out there - the whole "make an app, get users and cash out quickly" mindset. It's very bad and is a major reason why we see so many crap companies and apps launching all the time. But this won't last. Andreessen had a good tweet today "your startup is not the next WhatsApp." And it isn't. The 0.01% chance of this happening, already happened.
There are so many exciting and important problems that need smart people to solve them. Everything you've mentioned from the downright garbage that are EMRs at hospitals, to massive medical devices that can be shrunk, to endless paper work for cops and so many other industries who still use scanning and OCR software to organize their databases. Large but seemingly not-that-complex (from an engineering standpoint) problems. These - these need to be fixed.
It's kind of amazing that these services can find 30 or 40 new startups every single day -- a thousand per month, 12,000 per year -- and, even more amazingly, I suspect they're only capturing a small percentage of the real total.
From what I could tell after a couple of exhausting weeks reading these emails at least 99% of these startups are almost completely unnecessary. I'm not using "99%" and "completely unnecessary" as rhetorical bludgeons; I mean quite literally that less than 1% of these startups have anything more than the tiniest smidgen of utility or innovation to justify their existence.
I stopped reading those "startup news" emails because it was depressing to see so much talent and effort being squandered. I don't know exactly what else all these people could/should be working on, but if they can't find some genuinely useful ideas for startups then they (and the world in general) would be better off to just spend their spare time volunteering or reading books or hiking or having coffee with friends.
But those aren't the viable alternatives! These aren't typically wealthy people with time on their hands, they're people trying to find a good place for themselves in the economy by working on something that they think people will like. The real alternative is working for a bigger company, in which their marginal contribution may or may not be more useful to themselves and society, depending on the company, and on their role in it. It's possible to do something useful either as a big cog in a small machine or a small cog in a big machine, but there's no guarantee either way.
What I'd really like to see would be more "small businesses" and fewer "startups", but the economics of the software industry at the moment don't seem to encourage that.
My guess is that there are currently many more small software businesses than startups, but we don't hear a lot about them because (1) they're targeting business segments that we're not familiar with (e.g., writing accounting software for law practices, or creating web-based front ends for legacy COBOL systems) and (2) the media doesn't find them compelling enough to report on.
Love your comment but man, I really hate this quote every time it comes up.
The "best" minds aren't doing that.. they're working on the Large Hadron Collider, doing cancer research, coming up with pioneering surgery techniques, programming and landing robots on Mars.. the relatively small group of software engineers and data scientists working on pay per click advertising are nowhere near the top of the genius ladder.
Separate thing entirely, a great example of being too early I came across recently while reading a biography of Larry Elison was Larry Ellison and the "networked computer".. only 15 years too early with that one, alas :-)
They are all working to sell stuff - digital marketing for other companies or having ads as a core income for a site. They don't need to be devising the advertising frameworks, they just need to be thinking "how to make people click on ads".
The cohort of people working on the LHC, cancer research, etc., is largely the same as the faculty of any medium sized or larger university. If you went to any research-oriented university, your professors were the ones doing that kind of research. Still impressed?
I'm not looking to discredit the work of talented individuals at those companies - just pointing out that the driving force behind where innovative efforts are focused by senior management is likely to be what can generate the most ad revenue.
That was my interpretation of the quote - so not a literal "they all spend most of their time thinking about ads", but "they're employed by a company whose success is driven by how many ads get clicked".
Yes, you can avoid this by having an adblocker installed or being savvy enough to recognise what is and isn't an ad, but that doesn't apply to the majority. Just did a search now with adblock disabled, and 70% of the page is taken up by ads that look extremely similar to organic results.
Can't find the link right now, but there was a well documented case about companies who buy Google ads for things which should be provided free via the government, and slap a large processing fee on top of it. These companies end up making big yearly profits by duping people who don't know any better, and trust Google to show them relevant results, not realising that it's actually showing them the most lucrative results first.
Yeah that one might not bother you, but it's just one example... there are many more ways, some a lot more subtle, that having a primary focus of ad revenue degrades the quality of products.
On the other hand, making money from ads requires attracting users at very large scale. You can see this with Facebook and Google who try to make their product universally used, to the point where they have major initiatives to make their services available in third-world countries.
A subscription-based service deliberately leaves out people who are unwilling to pay. Even if those who do pay get better service (sometimes but not always true), there is a loss of utility from serving fewer users, particularly on the low end.
Whatsapp did a tiny sliver of that - they got acquired by Facebook. It's a trap.
The social network needs to be run by a non-profit.
¹ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2013/05/what-happens-when-non...
Strong data protection guidelines that prohibit giving third-parties access to data would be a starting place, but there are a lot of barriers you could put up to such an outcome (barriers that wouldn't be possible for a for-profit corporation.)
So I do regret many turnings I did not take, but only because of a misguided hope that a turning would have made me a different person to the one I am. I was building an email to web page maker long before twitter, but I am still working for a living.
I need to learn how to build a company online by building a company online - and learn to accept my personality for itself.
Pretty cool topics like sparse vectors, zero-knowledge proofs and social networks with applications in biology and digital medical records.
[1]http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/blog/video/lecture-...
That's what this great article delivers to us. We are not living in the most important exciting times in our respective fields. We've only just scratched the surface.
With a bit of perspective, and thought about how humans think, you will agree with me that we always think, at the time that we are living in, that the time that we are living in is the most important and exciting of all times.
It's not natural to think that in 100 years time things will be more exciting and important. It's not natural to think that in the 1980s, people were thinking that they were working on the most exciting and important times. It's not natural that we don't have perspective of the past and in particular the future, with regards to how the humans will be perceiving their present. But this thinking - that right now is the most crucial time in history ever - is not objective - it's not true - it's because our brains lack perspective.
What you want to avoid is writing 2014 COBOL, and that's what typical enterprise Java is. There'll be jobs maintaining that stuff for a while... But little mobility into anything more exciting.
Yeah, all ~100 of them.
Better normal Java than it's scripting counterpart though (the assembly of the web).
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." - Chinese Proverb
You could start an AirBnb for X RIGHT NOW. :)
The problem is that I see tons of opportunity. OP is right. Anyone who thinks the important problems are all solved has no creativity and no clue.
That said, I'm not a 50x people-hacker, nor am I a 125x money-haver. The confluence of excellent people-hacking, resources, and visionary creativity almost never happens. So we have people like me trying to make people click ads, and an startup industry founded around the sale of techie cantrips to creatively crippled conglomerates.