I’d moved to Silicon Valley hoping to make the leap from web dev to working in a startup. Unemployment in web dev hit 35%, startups weren’t hiring, it was very

I’d moved to Silicon Valley hoping to make the leap from web dev to working in a startup. Unemployment in web dev hit 35%, startups weren’t hiring, it was very rough. A couple lessons: - most of the ideas funded were predictive of the future, many were a decade early so those companies did not survive. Mark Roberge of Stage 2 Capital/Hubspot suggested recently that virtually none of the current AI startups will survive, but join one anyway so you can get into the next wave that will. - those that survived in any form went on to some great IPOs/exits. Being early suuuuucks, but having a 2-3 year head start on a trend pays off when the market returns. Most of the winners in GenAI today for this pattern. If you can be adjacent to a big winner (which in hindsight were pretty obvious: Google, Amazon, Facebook) you do well. - general sentiment on tech/internet was super negative, it was better not to talk about it because “fad/fraud” was the general response - if you could find any revenue generating opportunity, you were better off than everyone who raised capital By all appearances, we’re trending towards an AI apocalypse/tech down-turn. Much like in 2000, it took a new generation of college grads getting jobs and eventually making into management before buyer behavior started changing. We forget that tech doesn’t change markets, the buyers of tech do. One good strategy in a downturn is to go pure play PLG to SMBs and buckle in for 3-5 years.