These conversations about "way back when" and attempting to compare tech opportunities from one time period to another, always seem to focus on the wild opportu

These conversations about "way back when" 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. Please don'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. 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's law. 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. Every time constraints change, new opportunities emerge that either weren't possible or just didn't make sense before. If you're looking for opportunities, keep an eye on observable, recent changes, especially those that haven't yet been broadly distributed. Look for changes in constraints that are limiting large amounts of valuable activity. Some random examples in the last 5-10 years (IMO) are: - LLMs, obviously - Shared, cloud infrastructure made it trivially inexpensive to launch new business ideas - High speed computation has fallen in price so much that most applications don't even need cloud infrastructure anymore (IMO) - 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. - 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. - The electronics hobby market has exploded and made new hardware ideas possible, even if budget is limited. There are a bunch of these kinds of observations that you're uniquely positioned to observe and dig deep on. Most of them aren't viable, but the fun is in probing around at the edges of what's possible and learning. That's the thing that brings us closer to whatever will work. Maybe it's just me, but I've noticed that when I'm waking up frustrated and unhappy most days, it has almost always been because I'm ignoring my conscience, which has been trying to tell me that I'm not pointed in the right direction.