They say a developer at Microsoft or Google is like an airplane on an aircraft carrier. The entire system is working so that he can complete the task.
It's also how an American entrepreneur feels.
America is called the "Land of Opportunity" because opportunity has always been the only thing that mattered. All this Freedom is about Freedom of Possibilities. Someone wants to get married or get married, someone wants sex, status or security. America has always attracted a special kind of people who dreamed of something greater - freedom of opportunity. The freedom to get rich.
Freedom to start a new religion. The freedom to become a superstar. For these madmen, everything seems attainable, any dream, any faith, any idea. Everything in America is formed around this desire, this thirst for success in the minds of people, no matter how they imagine this success. In many countries, creating a successful company is much more difficult, an entrepreneur must not only create the company itself, he must create all the missing pieces of infrastructure around it. Opening a company in Silicon Valley is like plugging into a power outlet - all the founder's work is focused on creating the highest quality product, and a powerful infrastructure takes care of all the attendant concerns.
I think we are living in a time when humanity as a whole, from London to a small village in Cambodia, is becoming like America.
I don't think so for ideological reasons. Not because of the properties of people, the idea of freedom or property rights, although this is obvious to everyone, how much easier it is for entrepreneurs to thrive in a country where you know that as soon as you build a successful business, it will not be taken away from you, sometimes along with health ...
The reason is structural. We live in an era of opportunity.
The prehistoric hunter had the ability to light a fire, make a spear, and kill food. He simply did not have time for anything else, and the space of possible actions was severely limited. All of his entrepreneurial talent was limited to a slightly better way to kill a mammoth. The community was much more about how to divide what is already there - who will get the best piece of meat or rich hunting grounds.
Agriculture changed this when, for the first time in human history, wealth was not found and shared, but created. In addition to division, humanity has invented multiplication. But even in traditional societies, opportunities were limited by the need to follow the traditions that dictate every minute of people's lives, and by the requirement to remain all life in the social stratum where the person was born. And the hard work took the whole day.
With the advent of machines, mankind freed itself from exhausting agricultural work. Even at the beginning of industrialization, up to 90% of people were employed in agriculture. 90%. It's ... almost everyone. Today, only 1.5% of America's population is employed in agriculture.
Then industry followed agriculture. We now need less than half the population to create physical products. Much of the economy is devoted to creating services.
What is a service? This is when you collect several people, train them to do certain types of work and then assemble a "human machine" out of them according to the plans in your head. Each employee knows what result he should get, and has a good idea of how to do it. If you find a skilled barista, a great manager and a talented chef, you will have a successful cafe business.
You will also have a problem. You cannot scale one cafe.
To expand your company, you will have to make a franchise - describe every little thing in your business, pack it in neat identical boxes, which will contain everything you need to create the same cafe somewhere else, and then you will need to find someone smart enough to solve all the remaining problems in place. You will try to automate the process as much as possible in order to lower the talent requirements of the candidate to manage your franchise.
What if we could build machines for this too? What if we could automate the intelligence in your service industry so that you don't have to waste time setting up a branch every time you want to expand?
Welcome to the Cloud!
Register a domain, create a website with Notion, connect to an API gateway, make MySQL, run your ML model on TFX, advertise yourself on HackerNews and follow the feedback on Twitter. Congratulations, you run a company of cars, provide your own service to the whole world!
Previously, you would need an office with a hundred people on a salary, now you fit it into several virtual machines, and fixed expenses are minimized. 13 Instagram developers have created a service that sold for a billion dollars. Joe Rogan's podcast makes him millions while he sleeps. And then there is OnlyFans.
Armies of robots live in data centers, countless legions of physical robots are preparing to wake up in the real world, and they are all waiting only for your instructions on what to do.
Previously, you would need your whole life to realize an idea. You had to convince an army of people to work for you, and then raise an army of managers to help move this monster forward.
Today, with a team of talented developers using a modern technology stack, you can hack entire sectors of the economy from home.
This trend is only gaining momentum. In the next few decades, we will see automation become more intelligent, more and more things can be done much, much easier than ever. What previously required the efforts of entire countries is now becoming available to everyone. What was previously impossible to complex, is now used by kids in kindergarten.
This is why Silicon Valley is so hideously rich. Why do professionals capable of working with intelligent machines earn so much.
And that brings us back to possibilities. "A means, a condition necessary for the realization of something." Previously, these conditions were so limited that the possibilities were not available to almost anyone, but today they are practically free. The entire amount of human knowledge is available to the first grader. Automated factories create physical products based on your designs and ship them anywhere in the world. You have access to markets without getting out of bed. Even startup funding is quickly becoming an automated service.
Creating something new is now so simple that the world is becoming like a playground. You just have to come up with an interesting game and convince others to play it, and you become rich, your life takes on meaning and everything else that you want.
The Age of Opportunity? Considering how modern technology is similar to stories from children's fairy tales, perhaps we should call it something else. How about the Age of Magic?
Oh, and one more little detail. Always this little detail. All these incredible possibilities and almost unlimited tools may not be enough for you. You see, to be a powerful wizard in the world of this incredible magic, you have to pay a price. The good news is that this price did not have inflation, it is still the same price you would have had to pay ten thousand years ago or two years ago. This is discipline, this is concentration, this is diligent, deep work. Now close all these bookmarks, go and do what is difficult to do.
This article was originally written by me in English and published on Medium .