Every new industry has exuberance in advance of reality. The techies get carried away. There is a period of despair. Then the pendulum swings the other way, and people see the long term potential. It's like when the Internet bubble crashed.
There's absolutely no bubble in technology.
And, you know, I came out of college in the early '90s. That was a great time to exit school and get a job in the dot-com world and get educated.
If you go back to the '50s and '60s... there was zero tech in S.F. It was all in the Valley... and it crept northward in early 2000s.
Around '93, '94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.
There's a new generation of entrepreneurs in the Valley who have arrived since 2000, after the dotcom bust. They're completely fearless.
I like Chandrababu Naidu because he is the person who developed the city of Hyderabad and created the software boom. I also like K.T. Rama Rao for his work and the way he helps through Twitter and responds to many causes.
I remember in 1980 or 1981 looking at a list of people who had made a lot of money in the computer industry and thinking, Wow, that's amazing. But I never thought I'd be on that list. It's clear I was wrong. I'm on the list, at least temporarily.
AOL was a roller coaster ride. I was lucky and privileged to be a part of it, both the ups and the downs.
Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.
If you wanna see me in full '80s glory, I did one season of 'Halt and Catch Fire.'
There's no way anybody could have predicted how fast this industry would take off.
An IPO-mad technology boom made 'selling out' itself into an honorific.
I decided to come to the U.S. in the mid '90s because the Internet, which I knew was the wave of the future, was red hot here, but hadn't yet taken off in China.
Virtually every real breakthrough in technology had a bubble which burst, left a lot of people broke who'd invested in it, but also left the infrastructure for this next golden age, effectively.
