I was talking about this very topic with a friend of mine recently.<p>He works in advertising and felt moderately disingenuous about advising young people to go into a traditional ad agency.<p>There has never been a better, more stable time to start a business for most of the people in the western world. The internet has absolutely equalised just about every market you can think of. Fixed costs are a thing of the past; seed capital is plentiful (although there are the same number of top and second tier VCs, in Europe at least); being young is no longer a barrier to entry but a competitive advantage; there have been enough radically disruptive technologies in the last 30 years that it's pretty easy to convince seed investors to jump on board; we're living in a period where a lot of the world that was in poverty in the last four or five decades is coming out of poverty; middle classes are expanding all over the planet; with accessible languages like Rails and accessible architecture like Heroku it's a piece of piss to build and deploy a prototype…<p>The list goes on and on for me. The major barrier to entry for creating things rather than working in corporations is the type of personality people have. I see two types of people coming out of universities in Europe: people who see problems and bitch, and people who see problems and have solutions to them. (As an aside, I follow the hashtag #firstworldproblem on Twitter because first world problems are very often the basis of a great product or service.)<p>If you're a smart person working in a 9-5 then you're missing the biggest opportunity to do something fantastic, whether successful or not, that there has ever been. Forget the industrial revolution, or the early days of the internet. <i>Now</i> is the time to be building cool shit and telling people about it.<p>Rare for me to agree with DHH but on this topic I really do.
It literally broke my mind about when I realized that I didn't need to ask for permission from anyone to start a business. That very well might have been the first consequential decision I ever made in my life where that was the case.<p>I think that is related to one of the fundamental mindset shifts you have to go through, and it is a bit of a wrenching one: success is now successfully identifying and exploiting features of reality, such as project feasibility and customer demand, rather than adapting oneself to match the exact published criteria of the decisionmaker who can grant success. (pg has a much better phrase for this in the wealth essay: "wealth does not come from Daddy.")
This is a wonderful essay!<p>I often think about how extraordinarily lucky I am to be living through this technological boom. Computation, automation and mass-communication will continue to transform human society even more for decades. High-end software development skills will become even more scarce. Immersing yourself in the boom by running a software shop with a bunch of good friends - the best of times!<p>Earlier tonight I was talking to someone about how odd it seems to me that software startups normally aim to operate at a loss. Perhaps I am a romantic, but I like the idea of a business making a good profit. Especially when dealing with something as lucrative as software, a business should be profitable from day one. I have always regarded David and Jason highly for having a similar attitude.
"All we needed was an idea for a product that people were willing to pay for"<p>This is the difficult part, in my opinion.<p>Sure, "Ideas are all around us" but finding one that people will genuinely pay for, in a market big enough to be profitable yet not already saturated with high quality competitors, is very difficult.
This!<p>Every few decades there is some revolution, but there is very rarely one that is as revolutionary as the one we are living in now.<p>The argument can be made that the shipping container did something similar (with respect to distribution) that the internet is now doing - but that's only half of the equation.<p>The other half is building the product. Before the internet, sure you could find a public library near you and hope they have the right information (for you) that will help you learn the skills needed to build the product you want from scratch.<p>Now, everybody has access to not just the right information, but the best information - and it just gets better every day.<p>It's like having the library of congress at your street corner, no matter where you live, 100 years ago.<p>It is unprecedented how much we can do right now, how many people we can reach, and how much of an impact a single person can have with such few resources.<p>This is why I love economic progress. Without 'economic growth', we would have never reached here. People don't get that economic growth is synonymous with advancement. If we don't grow, we can't advance - and if we don't advance we can't grow.<p>I don't get why people would advocate not focusing on growth. If we don't grow, we die - if only for the fact that population growth is not slowing.<p>But also for the fact that in order to push civilization forward, we have to grow which creates the environment for these types of disruptions.
I sometimes wonder if this is here to stay, and indeed may even expand to other fields; or whether it's a transient phase, and in the future, people without lots to spend on capital won't be able to build businesses. I think the first is correct, but who knows. A serious think about the question and the economics behind it would be fun to read.
I still think there is one middle man that is very tough to get rid of: banks or payment gateways, like visa.<p>They still are getting their cut!<p>If bitcoin is going to change that, it is also going to create opportunity!
As a software developer I love this part about my job. But its these freedoms that I feel are now challenged by the App Stores.I hope they don't foretell the future of our industry.
"There's gold in them hills!" The (growth of) the Internet is like the days of the Gold Rush in the US. Everyone tries to strike it rich, and one a very few actually do find 'gold'. But I'll tell you who ALWAYS made a killing: The clever guys that sold the shovels and axes. Be a tool. (You know, like the guys at 37Signals).
There are more than 5 countries the US currently has trade sanctions or embargoes on, aren't there? That would make this blog post an admission of violating some federal laws, wouldn't it?<p>IANAL, I don't know why my mind jumps to such things... I doubt any website's been prosecuted for not having some kind of country blocklist.
DHH needs to get off his high horse. He's hacked his way into providing a tiny service for artsy folks but he's not exactly hacking on immortality tech or AI like some of us. The government needs to consider redistributing some of his wealth. This essay is him gloating about sitting on piles of cash, where's the concern for starving african children or terminal cancer patients. He should sell his company and work on immortality tech. He can start with extracorporeal devices like described here <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuBDhT7Y5GU" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuBDhT7Y5GU</a>