
You Are Not Late - mbrubeck
http://kk.org/thetechnium/2014/08/you-are-not-late
======
nugget
February 2004 I was a third year CS student in Boston. I remember complaining
to a friend of mine that we had missed the boat - Yahoo, Amazon, etc - the web
had matured without us and the window of opportunity was closed. If only we
had been born 5 years earlier! As fate would have it, that was also the month
I signed up for an account on a tiny site called thefacebook.com.

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.

~~~
platz
And how many get stuck on "false waves", I.e. survivorship bias. Sure, there
are more waves, but the ability to spot a wave is incredibly difficult.

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?

------
austenallred
The Internet is not just a technical innovation; the Internet is perhaps the
greatest _social_ innovation of all-time.

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.

~~~
ksrm
"almost everyone on Earth"? Not even close:
[http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm](http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm)

------
MichaelGG
The difference now is that it's much harder. The overall competence and just
general knowledge level is higher. Sorta like physics - essentially no one is
going to make a discovery today just sitting around and thinking, unlike
hundreds of years ago. Even comp sci: look at the algorithms that are named,
coming from the 60s or 70s. You could invent them just by thinking about a
problem. (I did exactly this. I spent a month designing some information
retrieval code, because I've got no education, and then my friend pulls out a
textbook and shows me my work, down to the same drawings.)

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.

~~~
jamesisaac
That's only really the case in mature fields (e.g. compsci), but the article
pointed out several newly emerged fields, where yes, you could well create a
significant discovery just by sitting and thinking about it (providing you
have a decently broad background knowledge).

~~~
semiel
This finally has really hit home for me while getting neck-deep in the crypto-
currency world, and in particular the realms of "smart contracts" and "DACs".
In that world, even the most straightforward things have yet to actually be
built. We haven't even solved the easy problems yet, much less the hard ones.
I'm honestly more worried about being too early than too late.

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.

------
jordanpg
Charming, feel-good piece for all the devs in the room, I'm sure.

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.

------
dakrisht
Fantastic. It's never too late to build or start something. I here a lot of
this from 30+ year old entrepreneurs ("but he's 23 fresh out of school" or "am
I too old?" \- NO! Not even close. The 23 year old with the traction and
venture money is a) extremely lucky and b) doesn't know half of what you
know!)

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.

------
tobydownton
This is the single best article I've read that explains why I'm writing the
novel I'm writing.

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.

~~~
grub5000
You should read "Ready Player One" if you haven't already. The VR in the book
is called Oasis. It might give you some ideas to go with yours:

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-
Cline/dp/009...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-
Cline/dp/0099560437/ref=sr_1_1/275-2691187-5632453?ie=UTF8&qid=1413121559&sr=8-1&keywords=ready+player+one)

Best of luck, man.

~~~
tobydownton
Hey, sorry the late reply! I already read RPO as soon as someone else told me
about it, and I absolutely loved it! Thanks so much for mentioning it. I'm
even going to brand Solarversia as:

"Hunger Games meets Ready Player One"

(but someone told me it work better using Hitchhiker's Guide as more people
know it.)

------
Animats
I've been too early a few times. I was working on secure operating systems in
the late 1970s. Proof of correctness in the early 1980s. My major work on the
Internet was in the early 1980s. I was working on robotics in the 1980s, and
legged robots in the 1990s. I was working on automatic driving in 2003-2005. I
figured out how to stop search spam in the 2000s. I have issued patents and
published papers on most of this. None of this generated much money.

(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.

~~~
petercooper
_" The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click
on ads. This sucks."_

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 :-)

~~~
chippy
agreed about "best" but in terms of population it's not a "relatively small
group" it's the majority.

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".

~~~
mcguire
chippy, I'll agree with you about the population (the number of people working
with the LHC or Mars landers---even indirectly, as the majority of Google
employees aren't working on ads---is _tiny_ compared to say, the ad- and
social-media-supported technical population of Silicon Valley), but I'm going
to have to disagree with "best".

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?

------
lifeisstillgood
The thing about "late" is really "I wish I had seen that". But even if I had
travelled back in time and left myself a note about Facebook I still am very
unlikely to have built a billion dollar company - because I don have that
brain / personality of Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezos or ...

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.

------
jcagalawan
Turing award winner John Hopcroft[1] has a similar message about the future of
computer science research[1]. He talks about how a lot of early CS research
was to make Computer Science useful by focusing on languages and algorithms
but how the focus is and will be changing.

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-...](http://www.heidelberg-laureate-
forum.org/blog/video/lecture-friday-september-27-john-hopcroft/)

------
lispm
In the mid 80s I had shortly this impression that computer science and
programming now are mostly done. It was when I had read the books (blue,
green, orange and purple
[http://www.world.st/learn/books](http://www.world.st/learn/books) ) on
Smalltalk 80. OOP, large class library, UI, ... All done. What would be needed
more?

~~~
tim333
Strong AI has a way to go.

------
chippy
Perspective.

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.

------
pervycreeper
If only I had the benefit of the perspective that a "2044 greybeard"
presumably will have.

~~~
CmonDev
At least don't write the code in an assembly of your times :).

~~~
michaelochurch
Yeah, those assembly-writing badasses making $500k at HFT funds are really
hurting. :)

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.

~~~
CmonDev
> _Yeah, those assembly-writing badasses making $500k at HFT funds are really
> hurting._

Yeah, all ~100 of them.

Better normal Java than it's scripting counterpart though (the assembly of the
web).

------
eps
Hindsight is always 20/20\. If you'd only knew what you should be paying
attention to now.

------
jorgecastillo
I don't know, I think the past was definitely better but there is no point in
thinking about it. You just have to move forward and not lose hope.

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."
\- Chinese Proverb

------
wellboy
Adding to this, for every new app, there are three new apps you can spin out
of it. Take AirBnb, now there are dozens of AirBnb for X models. Uber? Dozens
of Uber for Xs as well. AirBnb for boats, office spaces, parking lots. They
all worked.

You could start an AirBnb for X RIGHT NOW. :)

~~~
CPLX
Airbnb and Uber are the same model.

~~~
wellboy
What do you mean? AirBnB is for renting out stuff that is actually yours, Uber
is for getting something to you with the press of a button.

------
javipas
That post was published by Kevin Kelly too on Medium a few days sooner. I
wonder why he published it first there :o

[https://medium.com/message/you-are-not-
late-b3d76f963142](https://medium.com/message/you-are-not-late-b3d76f963142)

~~~
bojo
I knew I had read this article before, but couldn't remember where. Thanks.

------
huangc10
I always try to tell myself this. At the end of the day, I still think it
partly still has to do with "luck". Who knew bitcoins could explode? Just
strive now to find the next big thing is all we can do...

------
designservice
Yes! We need More brains to focus on solving real problems: clean water,
education, internet access, transparency, and less "Uber for X", candycrush,
Rovios, facevook, etcetera.

------
adamnemecek
I've never heard anyone complain that they were too late to build anything
cool.

------
johnm111888
lower barriers --> more competition

------
michaelochurch
What I learned in my 20s is that I'm not an island. I may be a +4 or +5 sigma
"visionary" (not to say that I am one) but if I refuse to learn the people-
hacking skills necessary to make people like and trust me (and for a long time
I thought that game was "dishonest", which was defensive rejection) then it
doesn't matter. Strong teams beat brilliant individuals, so if you're the
latter you _still_ have to understand the needs of the former (including how
to build great teams in the first place).

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.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Your first point here is critical. I've been lucky enough to get to know
several extremely successful people (outside of tech), and while all of them
are bright, they're probably about average for most of the people I went to
high school and college with. The thing they have in common though is that
they're all very good with people and got their starts through favors others
did for them.

------
imanaccount247
I think there's a real argument to be made that the attempts by corporate
america to stifle and limit the internet could prevent the amazing future
internet of 2044 from looking much different than what we have now. Latency,
bandwidth, reliability, data transfer caps have all been problems for decades,
and ISPs are actively fighting to keep them as problems or even to make them
worse (pay us extra to access netflix).

