Why it's never too late to invent Facebook

When thinking through my future career and inevitably (and unhealthily) comparing myself to the outliers of my field -- Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Dell, Mrs. Mayer -- there's always a point when I start mentally grumbling about missed opportunities. You could have invented the Tesla, Patrick, but you didn't! There's only one guy gets to make a billion dollars from the electric car, and now that can't be you!

My boss.

Ignoring for a minute all of the silly things about that statement, I think it's fair to guess that a lot of people harbor similar thoughts. When someone else exploits a market opportunity, it seems like the opportunity existed for a period of time, somebody had the vision to exploit it, and now the gap is filled. Meanwhile the market modernizes further, eliminating more gaps & inefficiencies, and you're a year older and closer to death. People don't need a fancy new MP3 player anymore because that other guy already gave it to them, and wait... is that a grey hair?

Truth is: this is all wrong. And I think we all intrinsically know it's wrong even though emotionally it feels like the train has already left the station. There is so much shit left to be invented and built. It's likely that as humans we'll find a way to exterminate ourselves far before we ever approach a diminishing rate of invention opportunity. As Geoffrey Moore says in the preface to Crossing the Chasm:

"... technological changes do not live in isolation but rather come under the influence of changes in surrounding technologies as well. In the early 90s it was the sea change to graphical user interfaces and client-server topologies that created the primary context. As we come to the close of the century it is the complete shift of communications infrastructure to the Internet. These major technology shifts create huge sine waves of change that interact with the smaller sine waves of more local technology shifts, occasionally synthesizing harmonically, more frequently playing out some discordant mix that has customers growling and investors howling."

Invention begets invention. The Internet is a perfect example of a precipitating wave, and I can tell you that as someone who is finally starting to understand how computer technology actually works: this stuff isn't all that complicated. I mean, it is super complicated. But fundamentally, all of the fancy stuff that you can do on your iPad nowadays is built on an infrastructure designed to transmit packets of text and numbers. I've seen the code that scaffolds the interior or iOS, Android, and web apps, and it's mostly a series of instructions explaining how to take some bits and change a few other bits depending on how those first bits look. Yet those little operations can combine to accomplish a bazillion different things.

That's what makes the Internet so amazing. A bunch of guys got together in the late sixties, figured out how to send signals from one computer to another, told some people about it, and waited. It took a little while, but eventually... BANG: electronic mail, web publishing, online banking, classified markets, dating sites, interactive gaming, online encyclopedias, social media, etc. etc. etc.

Guess what? They all just shuffle bits from place to place. Somebody left buckets of pink, yellow, and blue paint laying around, and waited until Van Gogh figured out what to do with them. And that's why we shouldn't glorify these founder-innovators and christen them with superhuman abilities. Yes, the Facebook guys are smart, but they're not prodigies. They're just a few sharp guys who put in the effort to build something that people wanted.

One final comforting thought is this: everything repeats. There must have been thousands of would-be inventors kicking themselves in 1909 for not building the Model T. They must have thought that all the good ideas were taken, too.

Could be you.