You Never Miss the Boat

Not sure if you caught the recent news in space tech, but SpaceX used a giant ass pair of robot arms called Mechazilla to snag a rocket out of the air. I don’t want to get bogged down explaining the science, but this was impressive. And to those saying why this hasn’t been done before, well getting a 20-story metal canister firing highly combustible rocket fuel to be steady enough for a pair of chopstick arm to hold it in place is insanely complex.

There are impressive breakthroughs in science and engineering happening all the time. Just this year, huge leaps have been made in Generative AI, new drugs are turning the tide on the global obesity epidemic, gene editing therapies using CRISPR are rolling out, and cloud companies are becoming nuclear plant operators. OK, they are not actually pivoting to energy utilities, but where’s the love for fusion startups?

This is the best time to be alive to see the fruits of human ingenuity take shape. Every day we can see innovation happening. Sometimes it is hard to grasp the insane leaps that are happening because of all the noise and distractions of our lives. But more often, our own vantage point is so limited by our short-term thinking that we fail to grasp the enormous potential in our near-term future.

I recently pulled up a Marc Andreessen interview in New York Magazine from a dozen years ago talking about the state of Silicon Valley before the dot com boom:

Technology in the U.S. is dead; economic growth in the U.S. is dead...I came out here in ’94, and Silicon Valley was in hibernation. In high school, I actually thought I was going to have to learn Japanese to work in technology. My big feeling was I just missed it, I missed the whole thing. It had happened in the ’80s, and I got here too late.

It is hard to imagine anyone today thinking that the tech industry is "dead" in the US, much less in the epicenter of tech innovation that is Silicon Valley. Before the dot com era, tech was not just uncool, it was something that people barely even thought about. All the cool tech such as consumer gadgets and electronics came from Japanese companies like Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Nintendo. The cool US tech companies like Apple and Atari were fading quickly to irrelevance. Tech in the US was a dead-end career.

Even in the early 2000's, tech was not cool. Americans were mad at the tech sector and blamed the industry for the recession. Despite corporate implosions such as Enron and Worldcom, the Gulf War, and a multitude of other global economic issues, it was sock puppet mascots and delivery startups catering to spoiled, young urbanites that became the scapegoat for the nation's misery. In the rampant desire by corporate bean counters to cut costs, they dropped IT workers like used dish towels and outsourced entire divisions in a flash to places like India and Eastern Europe. Suddenly, being a tech worker was not just uncool, it was about as secure of a job as a call center agent.

What we never saw during those periods is that the stagnation and uncertainty were only temporary. Living through that period felt like forever and the prospects for employment in tech seemed even more distant, especially for kids graduating college in 1990 or 2001 or 2009.? Those were the worst years for the US economy and job creation. On the flip side though, graduating in 1994 or 2004 or 2011 and going into tech was not only promising, it felt new and exciting with unlimited upside.? What made those years so different from the few years preceding?

Looking back, each of these years (1994, 2004, and 2011) brought a key innovation or trend that opened up new markets that did not exist beforehand. In 1994, you had the birth of the Web and launch of the first browser.? In 2004 brought low-cost public cloud infrastructures, such as the first public facing Amazon Web Service called Simple Queue Service (SQS).? Though 2011 was still weak for the US economy, it marked the year that mobile shipments overtook PC's, Android became a serious contender in the mobile market, and tablet sales were growing quickly.? In their own way, each was a Wild, Wild West of tech progress.? When the economy was muddling along, tech kept trucking along, coming up with more tricks.

I was lucky to graduate when the Web was taking off. Even if I had graduated a few years before or after though, there were always other tech waves behind that one that would give me another chance to catch the wave.? When mobile became stale, blockchain and crypto moved in. When the web3 hoopla died, Generative AI exploded in popularity with ChatGPT becoming the fastest app to reach 100 million users. When progress in Generative AI slows down, perhaps there is a new thread of AI that leads to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). And how knows, perhaps the next big leap come from innovations ranging from human-machine interfaces to interplanetary travel to vaccines to cure cancer, or something else that we could not even imagine today.

There are a lot of people that tell me they feel like they cannot keep up. The pace of change has been so rapid. Just to think about the past ten years of innovation alone is dizzying, let alone the past twenty years, which feels like ancient days. This is especially true of AI as there are new research papers and announcements on a daily basis (hint: use ChatGPT or Claude to summarize the articles). The best thing to do though is to stop trying to “keep up” and to start playing with the technology. I just used NotebookML from Google recently to upload my book Community-in-a-Box and create a 25-minute podcast. I have also been using Claude to sketch out UX and workflow ideas for my startup. I do not try to know or follow all the things; I just focus on what can help me today to get my work done faster or to consume knowledge more effectively. My method for keeping up is to just do.

This leads to another point, I do not worry about missing out. I do not get concerned when Ph.D.’s are busy making yet another food delivery app.? I do not mind the banal tech press hoopla over this app or that funding round. They are living in a world of now and a world of the obvious. There are plenty of others that are working on the hard problems, doing the fundamental research, probing at the very frontiers of science, engineering, and human understanding. I mentioned fusion earlier as cloud providers race to secure resources to power ever more demanding AI workloads, and there are over fifty startups backed by $5.5 billion to find solutions that deliver fusion power. If we solve the fusion problem, that could address everything from climate change to interstellar travel.

What I do worry about is when we stop dreaming. I grow concerned when we are more consumed by what is not possible. I become anxious when we think the tech industry has stopped innovating. I shake my head when people say we missed the boat. Here is the secret about technology innovation, there is no boat to miss because innovation and the spirit of human creativity makes sure there are always boats available for the next big thing.

Mark Birch

I live in NYC, I love NYC, but sometimes I feel like a stranger in NYC when it comes to the startup scene! Being back in NYC for a few weeks though helped me to get back into the swing of things.

I attended the NYC Data + AI Meetup last week to meet other AI folks and check out demos from local NYC AI startups. There were awesome presentations from Amy Zhang, Founding Engineer of Arcus; Emma Lawler, Co-founder of Velvet; Samarth Tripathi, Co-founder of WaxWing AI; and Sameen Karim, Founder at Flisk. Make sure to follow Amy Chen of Tola Capital and David Yakobovitch of DataPower Ventures to learn more about future NYC AI meetups and opportunities to attend, sponsor, or present.

This week I got a chance to reconnect with some of the OG’s and good friends from the NYC tech scene. Dorothy Chang and Andrew Chang started Lynx Collective to help bring the NYC startup community together after COVID. They hosted their first ever Startup Fundraising Summit bringing startups and investors together to learn about fundraising strategies and build connections. It was great to meet up with Jesse Middleton, who I knew from the WeWork Labs days and is now General Parter at Flybridge. There was also some excellent sharing on the investor panel by Jessie Lam of Alinea Ventures, Sumeet Shah of VHS Ventures, and Ashwini Anburajan of Side Door Ventures. Most of all though, I got to connect with many other early-stage founders building great tech companies in NYC!

After this week, I am heading back to Asia for two intense weeks for several startup events in Jakarta including the massive Tech in Asia Summit. Then I head over to Taipei to do my first public pitch of my startup at AiSalon. After that, I fly to Hong Kong to reconnect with and mentor some of my startup friends there. If you are in any of these places, please do reach out and let’s meet up!