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What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

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Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#11

Post by andrewljohnson »

ebiester wrote: post #8
andrewljohnson wrote: post #3

Which hobbyist invented the web? Blogs? It isn't at all obvious to me who he is citing, if these people are hobbyists. Also, was "most" open source software a hobby, or a professional scratching an itch? And the first pc? Is Chris trying to say that's woz, and he was a hobbyist? The whole blog post is a little too pat.

Is usenet not the precursor to Reddit? And the first blogs were certainly hobbiests. look at BBS zines as one example.

Please someone say a name or citation already. Who the heck invented usenet?

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#12

Post by _delirium »

shurcooL wrote: post #9
_delirium wrote: post #4

I think this is, on the whole, probably false. There are a lot of things the smartest people do on the weekend which will never catch on, because there is not much of a business case behind them. Not everything interesting is monetizable. One example: a lot of the smartest computer scientists of the 1960s were really into algorithmic art as a side-project hobby. Was algorithmic art mainstream in the 1970s? No. Hell,…

What's interesting to one person may have value to just that person, or it might be applicable to wider audiences. Things that have value (to people in general) are monetizable. That would explain why not all interesting things are monetizable.

It's more than just having value— the key element of monetization is being able to capture that value. Some kinds of value tend to diffuse in a difficult-to-capture way, while others are easier to turn into cash that goes into your own pocket. The most valuable things I've done myself are probably things where I've captured very little of the value. I've written hundreds of Wikipedia articles that have been read by millions of people, and done a lot of work on open-source projects, but I have captured no dollars from those activities. There might be some theoretical way of capturing the value those activities have produced, but I didn't avail myself of it, and on the whole I think it's difficult. But there are other things I've done, with lower value, which have put more cash in my pocket.

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#13

Post by itsprofitbaron »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #11
ebiester wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is usenet not the precursor to Reddit? And the first blogs were certainly hobbiests. look at BBS zines as one example.

Please someone say a name or citation already. Who the heck invented usenet?

Tom Truscott[1] and Jim Ellis[2] invented Usenet.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Truscott

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Ellis_(computing)

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#15

Post by pdeuchler »

I see where Chris is getting at, but he's not generalizing it well.

I think a better rule of thumb would be: Look at what new and upcoming technologies people with large domain expertise are excited about. Those technologies will probably be included in business practices within that domain in the near future.

Edit: It's also a rather self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously industry leaders will pave the way for their pet interests to gain more mainstream acceptance, and at the same time those who look up to said leaders often outsource the mental overhead of investigating the newest technologies to leaders who's purpose is to guide the community. This cycle is rather exacerbated when a leader creates a new technology that he/she is now interested in distributing.

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#16

Post by jamesbritt »

aroman wrote: post #2

While I don't disagree with the principle of this logic, can it be backed up some how with past examples? Were "the smartest people" really hacking on serious phone apps before iPhone and Android came out? (as an example)

While I don't disagree with the principle of this logic,

The logic seems to involve defining "smartest" as "did stuff on the weekend as a hobby that they later were able to turn into a successful business, product or tool."

There seems to be a serious selection bias going on.

Do we have any data on the stuff smart people have done on the weekend that never became anything notable?

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#17

Post by BuddhaSource »

It is totally worth it when a side projects gets serious, our hackathon project made more impact than our main product

However a growth hack for 3Crumbs evolved into http://Justmigrate.com We treated it as a hackathon project, had full freedom to ideate & execute. We build this after hours for a month & it was a great success. Lot of users loved it & this bought tears in our eyes :).

Weekend hackathons are important, it lets you think out of the box. Now our original product is seeing lot of evolution for better growth.

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#18

Post by derleth »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #3

Which hobbyist invented the web? Blogs? It isn't at all obvious to me who he is citing, if these people are hobbyists. Also, was "most" open source software a hobby, or a professional scratching an itch? And the first pc? Is Chris trying to say that's woz, and he was a hobbyist? The whole blog post is a little too pat.

> And the first pc?

The nearly-forgotten pre-microprocessor Kenbak-1:

> The Kenbak-1 is considered by the Computer History Museum and the American Computer Museum[1] to be the world's first "personal computer".[2]

> It was designed and invented by John Blankenbaker of Kenbak Corporation in 1970, and was first sold in early 1971.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenbak-1

The Apple 1 was many things, but there were personal computers before it; it was not the first in that field.

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#19

Post by derleth »

ebiester wrote: post #8
andrewljohnson wrote: post #3

Which hobbyist invented the web? Blogs? It isn't at all obvious to me who he is citing, if these people are hobbyists. Also, was "most" open source software a hobby, or a professional scratching an itch? And the first pc? Is Chris trying to say that's woz, and he was a hobbyist? The whole blog post is a little too pat.

Is usenet not the precursor to Reddit? And the first blogs were certainly hobbiests. look at BBS zines as one example.

> Is usenet not the precursor to Reddit?

Debatable. Usenet is decentralized as opposed to being dependent on a single bank of computers and beholden to a single group of owners.

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#20

Post by iamwil »

_delirium wrote: post #4

I think this is, on the whole, probably false. There are a lot of things the smartest people do on the weekend which will never catch on, because there is not much of a business case behind them. Not everything interesting is monetizable. One example: a lot of the smartest computer scientists of the 1960s were really into algorithmic art as a side-project hobby. Was algorithmic art mainstream in the 1970s? No. Hell,…

The sentiment is that tomorrow's markets and innovations comes from people that are on the edges, fringes, and seemingly wasting their time. Everyone loves and applauds the idea of innovation in abstract, but few people recognize it while it's happening, even those in tech.

Usually, it's written off as being non-monetizable, too much of a toy to do actual work, "why would anyone do that?", "I don't have any friends that do that", etc.

Search was considered non-monetizable at first. That's why internet giants of the 90's, like Yahoo, were focused on being portals.

PCs were considered too much of a toy to actually do any type of work. Back then, you did serious work on shared on on mainframes.

Radios, when shown to initial investors had one quip, "Why would I want to send messages to nobody in particular?"

When TV was shown to the same innovators in radio, they didn't think it would ever catch on.

Whether large numbers are divisible by primes seems like a useless branch of mathematics called number theory, but we found it useful for encryption. Without it, we wouldn't have online commerce, for math started 2 or 3 centuries ago, when there was no online commerce.

Point is, innovation happens when people try new and different things, even if they're weird. Even if they seem useless. Even if no one else is doing them. Even if people think it's stupid. Even if it doesn't make you money. Because there's something else that's motivating you to explore.

You don't have to be smart to try new weird things, but smart people tend to not worry about what other people think and go ahead and try new things.

Perhaps your quibble is the order of the statement. It's defn true that not all things that smart people do in their free time become something mainstream. But it's defn true that everything that we do nowadays, it was, at one time, something some smart person was already doing years ago.

So if you ever spot someone doing something seemingly weird, strange, useless, non-montetizable, but defn new, then stop yourself from being a cynic because it might be something you end up doing yourself in 10 years, as improbable as that seems now.

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