The Age of Opportunity
It has been said that a software developer at Microsoft or Google is akin to a jet fighter on a carrier. Everything else works just to make them execute.
This is also how an entrepreneur feels in America.
America has been called “The land of opportunity”, because the opportunity has always been the only thing that mattered. This is what freedom is all about. Some people look forward to a good marriage, sex, status or security. America has always attracted a special kind of people who dreamed of something more exciting — freedom of opportunity. Freedom to become rich. Freedom to start a new religion. Freedom to become a superstar. To this crazy bunch everything seems to be possible, every dream, every belief, every idea. Everything in America has been shaped by that desire, that urge, the thirst for success in people’s heads, whatever that success may be. Starting a company in many other countries is much harder, you not only have to come up with your own company, you have to build all the missing pieces of infrastructure. Starting a company in Silicon Valley is like plugging into a framework, you can focus on your core value proposition, and plug in all the the other pieces.
And I want to argue that we are living at the time when humanity as a whole, from London to a small village in Cambodia is becoming just like America.
The reason for the belief is not ideological. It’s not about types of people, the idea of freedom or the property rights, although it’s obviously immensely easier to flourish as an entrepreneur in a land where you know that your business is not going to be taken from you the moment you succeed, sometimes together with your health.
No, the reason is structural. The reason is that we’re living at The Age of Opportunity.
A prehistoric hunter-gatherer had an opportunity to make fire, build a spear and kill his food. You simply didn’t have time to do anything else with your day, nor you had an action space of any significance. All your entrepreneurship was limited to a more inventive way of killing a mammoth. Society was much more about dividing the pie — who gets the bigger piece or a better hunting ground.
Agricultural societies changed that by creating wealth for the first time. Instead of finding and dividing food they started to create it. They made the pie bigger. Still, in traditional societies their members’ opportunities were limited by the need to adhere to traditions in almost every minute of their lives and the requirement to stay within the social group where they were born. And again, they simply had too much work to do.
With agricultural machines humans liberated themselves from the exhausting physical work in the fields. As late as the very beginning of the industrial age around 90% of the world population did agricultural work. Just think about it. It’s.. everybody. Today less than 1.5% of the US population is involved in agriculture. So many humans have been given an opportunity to pursue so many other ways of life.
Then industry went the way of the agriculture. We now need less than half of the population to create physical products. Instead, we overwhelmingly produce services.
What is a service? It’s when you take human beings, train them to do a particular type of work, and then assemble a “human machine” out of them based on a design in your head. Each employee knows what results they’re supposed to achieve, and they have a good understanding of how to achieve that result.
If you find a well-trained barista, an amazing manager and a wonderful chef, you’ll have yourself a very successful service — a café.
There’s a problem, though. You can not scale a café.
In order to scale it, you need to create a franchise — describe every minute detail of your business, package it in boxes that will have everything you need to kickstart a new location, and find somebody intelligent enough to figure out all the residuals. You will want to automate the process as much as possible, so that you don’t require too much intelligence from the candidate.
What if you could create machines for this too? What if you could automate the minds in your service, so that you didn’t need a local franchisee at all?
Welcome to the Cloud!
Register a domain, create a web-site in Notion, connect it to an API gateway, spin up MySQL, run your ML model in TFX, advertise on HackerNews and collect feedback via Twitter. Congratulation, you are a CEO of a company of machines, single handedly providing a service to the world!
What used to take an office of a hundred people on full-time salary now fits on a few virtual machines, with the fixed costs brought down to the minimum. 13 developers at Instagram built a service that was sold for $1bln. Joe Rogan podcast automatically earns him millions while he sleeps. There’s also OnlyFans.
An army of robots occupies data centers, and legions of even more robots are getting ready to wake up in the physical world, all they’re waiting for is your commands.
You used to need a lifetime to bring an idea to life. You used to need to persuade an army of people to work for you and then create another army of managers to help you drive this behemoth forward.
Now, with a team of talented developers leveraging the latest technology stacks you can disrupt whole segments of the economy from home.
This change is only gaining speed. In the next few decades we’ll see automation becoming even more intelligent, even more things will become much, much easier than ever before. What used to be only achievable by countries is becoming available to everyone. What used to be thought of as being impossibly complex is now at the service of a toddler.
This is why Silicon valley is so filthy rich. Why professionals who can work with intelligent machines cost so much.
And this brings us back to opportunity. “A set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something”. These circumstances used to be so limiting that opportunity was out of reach for almost everyone, but now it’s almost free. The whole body of knowledge of humanity is available to a first-grader. Development and deployment are so much less of a drag. Automated factories create physical goods based on your design and ship them anywhere in the world. You can access the markets from your bed. Even financing a startup is quickly becoming an automated service.
Building things now is so simple that the world is almost getting similar to a children’s playground. It’s almost like you just need to imagine a wonderful game, and then to persuade other kids to play with you, and you will be rich, your life will have meaning or whatever tickles your fancy.
“The Age of Opportunity”? Looking at how our advanced technology sometimes seems to have come straight from the fairy tales, maybe we should call this something else. How about “The Age of Magic”?
Oh, and there’s one more thing. There’s always that one more thing. All this incredible opportunity and almost infinite leverage may be not enough for specifically you. See, in order to be a powerful wizard of that wonderful magic, you need to pay the price. The good news is — there has been no inflation. It’s still the same price that you would need to pay ten thousand years ago or two years ago. It’s discipline, it’s focus, it’s hard deep work. Now close all these tabs and do shit that’s difficult.
