| Hey Zach, advice to you from an industry elder. From your comments, I would put you in your late 30s, young enough to be scrappy but experienced enough to be on a founding team. The only reason for doing is to gain industry domain experience. (Software doesnt count.) The domain can suggest startup possibilities. Consulting income is a trap, unless you make massive savings. Dont look back at what might have been. I worked on a VisiCalc equivalent on a 7094 in the 60s. One of the members of the founding team of Sorcim worked for me (remember SuperCalc?). Dont say I didn have my chances to be rich and famous. Dont look sideways. If it is being done now, someone has beaten you to it. And someone else is working on the second generation. Dont scratch your own itch. Software itches dont make money. Too many smart people doing the same thing. Do cultivate relationships. Do look for other people,s problems. As you noted , if it bugs the common man or the elderly, it is probably an annoyance for everyone else. |
Cool to hear about your earlier escapades. My business partner and I were just getting a foothold in Mac OS 9 shareware games when Apple switched to OS X and antiquated the code we had worked so hard on for 5 years. I took it really personally and suffered several years of depression. Things didn't turn around for me until I stopped using my own code. Now I don't maintain an "engine", I just scavenge commonly used code and find that it shields me from the whims of proprietary APIs.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, I also look back on what might have been, and sometimes wished I had been born 5 years earlier, when things were “booming”. But it’s an easy trap to fall into, because at least for the time being, programmers’ leverage is increasing faster than competition can fill the niches. Kids today, what with their supercomputers and megabit internet connections and being able to stand on the shoulders of giants’ open source projects! Get off my lawn! In my day we didn’t even have the internet! We had BBS’s, and floppy disks that stopped being readable, and books.. paper books! Imagine such a thing! And girls didn’t even use computers! Neither did teachers! Can you imagine?
I too have often wished the geeks and hackers of the world were better at networking. Generations of potential have been lost to reinventing the wheel. It’s kind of ironic that we’re so able to communicate in this distributed fashion and solve problems but have so few interpersonal and professional relationships.