3 ms·

Since you seem to be good at picking the right horse early, what are your favorite new sites/companies right now?

nostrademons 16y ago
I'm good at looking at the right horse early. I suck at picking the right horse early, otherwise I'd be far wealthier than I actually am. I tend to move far too slowly, even once I think I know where the right place to be is, and get in just as it's becoming popular (and get out just before it crashes - I was telling my sister, before I took my latest job, that I've been a part of almost every major bubble of the 21st century. Was at an all-teenage dot-com in 2000, a financial software startup in 2005-2007, and a web 2.0 startup in 2007-2008. I hope that's not reflective of Google's future prospects...) Makes for a comfortable living, but for real wealth you need to take a few more risks than I tend to... Some things that I've been looking at that seem quite interesting to me now, though: - LikeALittle.com - Android. I think that long-term, it has more potential than iOS. The mobile phone space in general has the potential to be huge. - OCR, computer vision, and other applications of machine learning to imaging problems. - Functional programming languages, particularly Haskell - YCombinator. I think PG's generally right about their being a trend toward startups in the future, and startups that serve startups will become quite big. I also have the stinking suspicion that the next world-changing tech revolution is in the garage now, and not one of the startups founded from 2004-2010. I, of course, do not know what it is. But there've been a bunch of enabling technologies recently developed - mobile phones and cloud-computing come to mind. And there's also a bigger concentration of brainpower in a smaller volume than we've seen before, with the rise of Google/Facebook/Twitter/Palantir and supporting universities and startups in Silicon Valley. I'm somewhat wondering what will happen when Google ceases to be a nice place to work, because for the last 10 years, they've been recruiting the best minds from all over the planet, putting them 5-to-a-cube in a handful of buildings, and working really hard together. Much of what they learn is probably applicable to a wide range of problems, but because the company is so focused on search, I doubt we've seen all the developments that could come out of that.

I'm good at looking at the right horse early. I suck at picking the right horse early, otherwise I'd be far wealthier than I actually am. I tend to move far too slowly, even once I think I know where the right place to be is, and get in just as it's becoming popular (and get out just before it crashes - I was telling my sister, before I took my latest job, that I've been a part of almost every major bubble of the 21st century. Was at an all-teenage dot-com in 2000, a financial software startup in 2005-2007, and a web 2.0 startup in 2007-2008. I hope that's not reflective of Google's future prospects...) Makes for a comfortable living, but for real wealth you need to take a few more risks than I tend to... Some things that I've been looking at that seem quite interesting to me now, though: - LikeALittle.com - Android. I think that long-term, it has more potential than iOS. The mobile phone space in general has the potential to be huge. - OCR, computer vision, and other applications of machine learning to imaging problems. - Functional programming languages, particularly Haskell - YCombinator. I think PG's generally right about their being a trend toward startups in the future, and startups that serve startups will become quite big. I also have the stinking suspicion that the next world-changing tech revolution is in the garage now, and not one of the startups founded from 2004-2010. I, of course, do not know what it is. But there've been a bunch of enabling technologies recently developed - mobile phones and cloud-computing come to mind. And there's also a bigger concentration of brainpower in a smaller volume than we've seen before, with the rise of Google/Facebook/Twitter/Palantir and supporting universities and startups in Silicon Valley. I'm somewhat wondering what will happen when Google ceases to be a nice place to work, because for the last 10 years, they've been recruiting the best minds from all over the planet, putting them 5-to-a-cube in a handful of buildings, and working really hard together. Much of what they learn is probably applicable to a wide range of problems, but because the company is so focused on search, I doubt we've seen all the developments that could come out of that.