> I would love to make billions writing a chat app In 1998 I wrote an IRC client for Linux/Gtk+. Really the first graphical app that wasn't Tcl/Tk or Motif bas

> I would love to make billions writing a chat app In 1998 I wrote an IRC client for Linux/Gtk+. Really the first graphical app that wasn't Tcl/Tk or Motif based. Even back then people were saying "yet another IRC client", due to the fact that there were dozens of them around. I was often embarrassed to talk about my work because it just felt a bit lame and overdone. But in reality, I wasn't thinking big enough. Since then: Twitter, WhatsApp, and Slack all came along and made billions. And also Line, WeChat, Snapchat, and more. This all came after AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and others died off. Slack was not even 10 years ago. I'm still baffled at how Slack happened. Any one of us could have created it, but did not. What you should realize is that the marketplace is fluid and changes based on technology, incumbents losing their mojo (see AMD vs Intel right now), and various other factors. People often talk about first-mover advantage, but I've never seen the relevance. Facebook came after MySpace, Friendster, and others. MySpace was vastly more open, and yet Facebook, with their restricted profiles and limited availability eclipsed MySpace. Slack came into an environment with Skype and Hipchat. Microsoft and Atlassian both had deep pockets and first-mover advantage and couldn't win. Google was up against Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, and even offered itself up for sale to AltaVista for $1 million. But in the end they had the better tech and the better user experience.