You are not late (2014)

There are always opportunities, at least in the USA.<p>I started programming in 1985 and thought I was very likely too late. I was the same age as Chris Espinosa, who was Apple&#x27;s head of documentation at age 14. At that time it was still not perfectly clear that PCs would be regarded as essential to business. I had no one to talk to about computers and programming. I was in a very rough spot in my life and had to teach myself everything, while not being sure I&#x27;d have a job in 5 years.<p>A decade later in 1996 I started at Microsoft, which virtually all of my peers thought had run its course. They were selling stock like crazy. By the time I left 4 years later the stock had gone up 1300%. Last I checked it&#x27;s gone up yet another 2500% or so--I kept my 1,000 ESPP shares mostly out of nostalgia and thanks to a company that was so good to me.<p>I bought a website after the first dot com bust of 2001, monetized it by hiring well, and it provided a very good living for well over two decades after that.<p>This is an incredible time to start a web-based business because there&#x27;s a surfeit of free and almost free tools for development all the way to deployment.

While I agree with the spirit of the post, I think that there are better and worse times to start something new, and in retrospect 2014 seems like it was one of those worse times. The period from 2014--2024 was an era where the sheer gravity of the big tech platforms crushed out innovative startups left and right. People with an extreme focus on product polish could succeed, like Slack (est. 2013) and Discord (est. 2015), but it feels like most of the tech-sphere was either just working on half-hearted products towards an inevitable acqui-hire, or fervently trying to mainstream blockchain in a wishful attempt to create an entirely separate, more open ecosystem.

Not to seem pessimistic, but in the 10 years since this article what have we really gained on the internet that we didn’t have then? Seems like we got a lot more social media and some failed promises from crypto. This is barring the current ai stuff since it’s still really shaking out.

<i>The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today.</i><p>I don&#x27;t know why anyone would sit around moping about &quot;If only this were thirty years ago!&quot; If it seems like your idea would be &quot;easy&quot; or something -- if <i>only</i> it were thirty years ago -- then most likely it&#x27;s because we are where we are and you know what you know now that you wouldn&#x27;t have known then.<p>It&#x27;s like all the people who say things like &quot;Youth is wasted on the young&quot; and &quot;I wish I had known what I know now back when I was seventeen.&quot; Yeah, you know it at all because you aren&#x27;t seventeen.

I feel like the last 10 years have been a maturing phase. There weren’t a lot of opportunities for young upstarts without funding. It seemed like it was the era of big money innovation, burning mountains of cash trying to stake the last few open claims on the app and web ecosystem. And there was the crypto stuff, yuck, many went to prison.<p>But the real revolution is AI. Thinking back to 2014 and peering forward, it’s unfathomable. If there had been a sci-fi movie, I would have thought it unrealistic. I still think I have no idea where this will take is or how much our industry will change. What a great time to be an entrepreneur.

I&#x27;m young, and talking about years like 1985 feels like talking about some other reality, but to me it still feels like the two years aren&#x27;t comparable.<p>Whenever I read about the history of computers and software in the 80s, it feels like there are always mentions of relatively new companies foraging their path, new hardware manufacturers and software developers shaping the brand new home computer industry. Sure, there were some old giants on the playing field, but it almost sounds like anyone with a decent idea could carve out a space for themselves.<p>2014 though? There were a bunch of opportunities back then, obviously, but it was already deep into the megacorp consolidation era, when large software or web companies owned dozens of unrelated services and had secured an almost endless influx of cash. There were startups, and a few of them became extremely successful, but it feels like most of them were either doomed to fail or be bought out by a larger company. I feel like in this last decade, internet innovation had mostly slowed - the internet of 2004 was extremely different from the internet of 2014, yet 10 more years passed since then and it doesn&#x27;t feel like as much has changed.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s just my imaginary rose-tinted view of the past or something, but it feels like it&#x27;s harder than ever for a startup to compete with the big players now. The only big exception I can think of is video games - self-publishing anything was probably almost impossible in the 80s, but nowadays we have an endless sea of development and publishing tools for independent developers with fresh new ideas.<p>Perhaps, there&#x27;s a completely new field on the horizon that will level the playing field once more, putting everyone back at square one. I think that some industries could get squeezed dry until the next big innovation comes along, or people move onto some other new space.

I have hope for many more turns &#x2F; revolutions!<p>Boy have we been in a holding&#x2F;consolidation pattern. The age of massification has been upon us; getting everyone else online has been <i>the</i> effort, the way to rise. Free online services we can connect to from anywhere has been an amazing change, a totally new expectation that totally changes how computing situates itself in our lives.<p>At much cost to figuring out further places to pioneer, I feel. We need new cycles with new energy, where lots of people are trying stuff out again. Computing &amp; tech should not stay well settled; we should be trying crazy stuff. It feels like a lifetime ago that Tim O&#x27;Reilly was preaching <i>&quot;follow the alpha geeks&quot;</i>, look for those very capable folks doing excellently for themselves. That ability to trendspot &amp; try lots of things has been somewhat by these huge scales &amp; systems, but I believe a return to personal-ity has to crop up again sometime. We&#x27;ll find some fertile terrains where new things are a happening again.<p>2014 was when thing were actually really setting in place, when the pioneering stage was really giving way to some settlers (and town planners, see: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.gardeviance.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.gardeviance.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;on-pioneers-settlers-to...</a>). There&#x27;s a lot of roughness, but tech getting it&#x27;s mojo back may be not far off. It&#x27;s a challenge though; the reality of creating ever-connected ever-online systems is <i>hard</i>. We have amazing amounts of server we can fit in a pizza box, at incredibly low $&#x2F;performance, but we&#x27;re unpracticed at doing it without pain at smaller scales, by ourselves, anew. Trying to create new generative platforms, that serve as a basis to let more value spring up: it needs a strong foundation, so that it can keep &quot;creating more value than it captures,&quot; another O&#x27;Reilly-ism.<p>The future is (with hope) exciting!

As someone who has used the Internet since 1985, I constantly find myself reminded of the fact that the <i>Internet isn&#x27;t just port 80</i>. The Internet is so much more than just the web, and when someone comes up with a cross platform, powerful application which uses some other port and some other protocol, it will be just as functional on the Internet as any other Web Browser.<p>We could just as easily produce clients which exchange Lua bytecode. In fact, we do (Games, etc.) .. but we could just as easily build an <i>execution environment</i> (which is what browsers are) that allows a much wider and broader range of application capabilities than the browser.<p>This, then, is what I have in mind, when I think &quot;I&#x27;ve been on the Internet too long, I&#x27;ve become jaded&quot;: actually, the browser is just the lowest common denominator. As soon as some other client application is built which pushes user experience beyond what the browser is capable, the Internet will <i>still be there to host it</i>.<p>And I find that inspiring, even after 40 years of crud.

Unlikely to be a popular question in this forum but in my view the most important topic we need to reflect on is “are we really better off with these services?” - obviously at face value there is utility or there wouldn’t be the market penetration but the externalities and issues of market dominance are becoming more apparent and pressing.<p>And if we agree that better solutions are needed then the question becomes “how do we create the market conditions that support those better outcomes?”<p>I’d really like to see kk reflect on this article with 10 years hindsight and see if he remains optimistic.

&quot;Opportunities still exist&quot; is not at odds with &quot;the low hanging fruit has been picked&quot;.<p>At the moment both statements above are true, meaning we (the little guy) are on average fucked. Sugar coating it with platitudes and cheap aphorisms doesn&#x27;t change the reality that opportunities have dried out for all but the wealthy and connected and even for them it&#x27;s not easy.

This fun thought only holds true if the internet is not in decline. in 2014, which very arguably was peak internet, I could understand not thinking that, but today, I struggle to imagine how this isn’t the case.

History shows that there’s no such thing as late, as we are humans, there are always vacuum to fill if people take ownership for them. Rebels, inventors, thinkers, hackers. They all emerged in different times by taking ownership.<p>It is only the perception of this innovation that could change as times go on.

I&#x27;m pretty effective at my job (embedded software) and I have a decade of pretty solid experience writing device drivers and debugging some really tough issues. But I always feel like I&#x27;m not at all ready for the caliber expected on the US job market. I joined a startup so that I could be pushed harder and to prove to myself I can thrive in an environment where it is expected that you will put in 300% effort.<p>Who knows maybe I&#x27;ll give it a go in a couple of years.

An old coworker of mine had a friend who created an app for tugboat captains, and is now pulling over 200k a year from it (probably more now). There are opportunities, they&#x27;re just not very &quot;cool&quot;. Have to look in unusual places.

as a side note, I find it curious how back then technology innovations were largely ignored for years after they mature (over a decade for companies to start claiming domain names), and today technology is hyped even before it becomes practical (blockchain, llms)

A few general observations: While there are still opportunities, perhaps fewer in developed and more in developing countries, the QUALITY of opportunities were different back in the days. The SOFTWARE field was still relatively wide open. The barrier-to-entry was being nerdy smart, but otherwise the costs (basic computers, telephone line access, some education) were low, at least in parts of the USA. Simultaneously the potential return was high. Because the information age was just beginning, and the world was hungry for software. People who were smart with software at that right time could literally shape the coming world. Think Microsoft and Google. In comparison, while the hardware side (chipsets, telecom equipment, etc) has grown, it hasn&#x27;t &quot;exploded&quot;, maybe except CPU or GPU, which are hugely capital intensive. You cannot train AI in your garage yet in a way that differentiates your &quot;product&quot; from that of the big players. The demand for pure software is no longer that high. On the hardware side, barriers to &quot;physical&quot; innovations, such as semiconductors, medicine, etc are still high now as ever. The &quot;low&quot; hanging &quot;soft&quot; fruits have been picked. This now feels more like the big mainframe computer era. So while there are still opportunities, they aren&#x27;t comparable to the past. When science and technology fundamentally changed in the past, from manual labor to machinery to electronics etc, they opened up new fields for human innovation and endeavors. Groundbreaking disruptions are much rarer now, and the only one, AI, opens up a new field more for computers than for people.

Most of the things that made up the internet in 2014 were created in the second half of the internets lifespan at that point in time. Assuming that this trend continues, most of the things people will use in 2044 still have to be invented. You don&#x27;t now what the new things will be. But looking back we notice that a lot of things came into our lifes recently.<p>We are so used to these big innovations that it feels like they have always been there.

They already figured out bronze that you can build anything you can imagine out of. Why would I put any more effort into metallurgy ?

I think another consideration here is not the internet itself but its distribution. Internet economy is not an anarcho capitalist environment anymore where any opportunity is wide open. It is more restricted to big circles or ecosystems controlled by Big Tech.<p>Take mobile and app stores. There are teams and people that build so many innovative and better solutions to deal with apps and app stores, yet they are simply not allowed.<p>AI does not change this norm. VR and AR perhaps, but they are also dominated by the same companies. Web3 was a good bet to change it but seems like it is not happening, at least the way we thought it should happen.<p>I am still optimistic about the future but possibilities are realistically rarer.<p>Ref: Yanis Varoufakis also talks about this in context of a digital feudalistic society.

I had this revelation a while back as well. Imagine all the people getting born today, and they have some growing up to do. By the time they are ready to go out and do stuff, more time will pass.<p>There is certainly nothing they can do about the timing of their birth and they will have to do the best they can.<p>You can imagine being born today and it&#x27;s even better than that because you are ready to take action already, right now!

This would be a lot more true if we could break up the trillion dollar tech monopolies. And we could do it if we would muster up the political will to do it. Step one is to stop idolizing the crony VCs and billionaires.

The same freedom should apply to LLMs!<p>Specially because, initially, the internet only provided content free of charge - now we actually pay subscriptions to use the top LLMs.

I like this.<p>It reminds me of an anecdote Tony Robbins tells about a gold miner who just says, “The thing people don’t realised is there’s gold EVERYWHERE”

These conversations about &quot;way back when&quot; and attempting to compare tech opportunities from one time period to another, always seem to focus on the wild opportunities and forget about the equally insane constraints.<p>Please don&#x27;t forget that in the late nineties, CPUs were measured in a few hundred MHz, RAM in tens of MBs, and network speeds were kilobytes per second.<p>FOSS was a new idea and most software cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. People PAID for compilers! Workstations cost many thousands and servers cost millions. These investments would be literally wiped out every year or two by the leading edge of Moore&#x27;s law.<p>In the late nineties, I worked for a company that charged $3 million to a big brand to build a website with user forums. It took a year and more than 30 people to launch. We had to buy ~$1m worth of server hardware and fasten it into racks.<p>Every time constraints change, new opportunities emerge that either weren&#x27;t possible or just didn&#x27;t make sense before.<p>If you&#x27;re looking for opportunities, keep an eye on observable, recent changes, especially those that haven&#x27;t yet been broadly distributed.<p>Look for changes in constraints that are limiting large amounts of valuable activity.<p>Some random examples in the last 5-10 years (IMO) are:<p>- LLMs, obviously<p>- Shared, cloud infrastructure made it trivially inexpensive to launch new business ideas<p>- High speed computation has fallen in price so much that most applications don&#x27;t even need cloud infrastructure anymore (IMO)<p>- The amount of trust many people have in big tech companies is at a nadir, this could be a great time to carve out a beach head in anything they do. Being perceived as trustworthy and NOT THEM could be enough to build a great business.<p>- Many people seem to feel that social media is net bad for us, figure out how to solve the same problem set (feeling engaged and connected?), with fewer negative trade offs.<p>- The electronics hobby market has exploded and made new hardware ideas possible, even if budget is limited.<p>There are a bunch of these kinds of observations that you&#x27;re uniquely positioned to observe and dig deep on.<p>Most of them aren&#x27;t viable, but the fun is in probing around at the edges of what&#x27;s possible and learning. That&#x27;s the thing that brings us closer to whatever will work.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s just me, but I&#x27;ve noticed that when I&#x27;m waking up frustrated and unhappy most days, it has almost always been because I&#x27;m ignoring my conscience, which has been trying to tell me that I&#x27;m not pointed in the right direction.

A great reminder, and interestingly prescient given the AI growth in the past couple years.

Well sure, in <i>2014</i> you were not too late, but <i>now</i>...