One of my friends recently shared Paul Graham's essay on his previous work. I highly recommend taking some time to read it and get a glimpse into the seemingly unique (and fortunate) journey Graham has had over the years.

Throughout the essay and in conversations with my friends afterwards, one idea stuck out that I have heard repeated over the past 10 years: the glory days of software are now behind us. Many people look wistfully at the software industry before the first dot com bubble burst and often write about it in nostalgic terms. The sheer breadth of undefined territory and opportunities for creativity during that era almost sound like the technological equivalent of the Wild West. People were tinkering with languages on computing devices that were hard to come by, the first GUI-based text editors came onto the scene, personal devices became a reality, the World Wide Web took the globe by storm, and initial experiments with e-commerce would lay the foundation for a revolution in how business is done at all levels.

In hindsight, it's easy to connect the dots and identify inflection points in history. We can chart the movements of industry giants and explain how and why they were successful. The sheer number of Silicon Valley success stories from the earlier days makes it seem as though any smart person with an idea and a willingness to get technical could have made a fortune while shaping the future of technology.

Romantic: "marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized [Merriam-Webster]

When looking at the first "Golden Age" of Silicon Valley, it's easy for us to remember massive leaps in so many different areas. We saw the rise of giants in database technology, productivity software, consumer operating systems, networking protocols, e-commerce, computer graphics, cybersecurity, embedded systems, and so much more. We might also look at the past as the Wild West because of how unpolished things used to be (hello, Geocities) as everyone ran at full speed to their next creative idea.

Creativity is an important part of this narrative. Creative thinking romanticizes limitless possibility and the raw, unpolished state we all call potential. It's a lot easier to recognize potential 20, 30, or 40 years later after we have seen what hard work, a lot of luck, and even more money can do when it comes to building business empires in and around undeveloped fields.

It's true. The economy in general makes it a harder for people to have as much social and economic freedom as they may have had in previous generations. On the other hand, it's also true that a lot of the scaffolding we have today simply didn't exist in the older day of Silicon Valley. AWS may have changed the game when it came to cloud-hosted solutions, but the sheer breadth of access to development has broadened the population of potential tinkerers, innovators, and inventors.

In today's world, anybody can get started with development. I've lost count of the number of free, accessible hosting solutions for basic backend services and static websites. Developer environments are easy to set up with a quick online search, and there is a different developer community for every framework and platform. Open source software has given us a bounty of UI frameworks, storage options, networking interfaces, ML libraries, and whatever else you or anybody else may need to bootstrap a project from scratch.

I have also heard a lot of pessimism around what the next great leap in technology will be or if we'll see one in the near future. AI is still a far cry from what we see in Hollywood, but it is much closer to reality than we think. From everything as large as self-driving cars to the disturbing future (and present) of deepfakes, nobody really knows where or when the next big leap in AI will happen. Meanwhile, healthcare is trying to catch up despite the restrictions and slowdowns of government regulation, and even the idea of what it means to be "present' with our friends is blurring for the average person with Clubhouse, Zoom, and Discord exploding in popularity over the past year.

As nostalgic as we all are for how much opportunity the previous generation of innovators had in Silicon Valley, I can guarantee that the next generation after us will say the same thing about whoever finds success today. The wild frontier of technological innovation is still alive and well in software, but it can be tempting reminisce about yesterday instead of making a bet on one the paths to tomorrow.

Silicon Valley exists due to the almost naïve and hungry optimism of so many people. Those same people might not be as concentrated in the Bay Area as they once were, but there are enough ambitious souls driving towards the next generational leap in technology. The only question we each need to ask ourselves is if we're letting our romanticized notions of the past hinder our optimism and creativity as we look towards the future.

I, for one, cannot wait to see what happens next.