Yesterday, I started the Technology Entrepreneurship MOOC taught by Stanford's Chuck Eesley, and I am loving it. (Big shout out to @Edmundo Braverman for recommending the class.) The class only opened last night, and already I've teamed up and hit the ground running with engineers in the Netherlands and India.
Included in last night's material was a short three-minute video featuring Erik Straser, Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures. In this video, Erik argues that the most important thing you can do for your career is to "figure out how to ride a long wave - some immutable trend that is going to permeate most of the tenure of your career." See the video below:
Erik suggests that you find a "wave" that coincides with your interest, skills, geography, and what you want to do with your life. You alone can decide where that intersection is, but we can crowdsource what we think will be the waves of the next 30 years.
Here are Erik's predictions:
- Information technology
- Bio-engineering
- Moving biology into a quantitative science
- Energy and the environment
What would you add to the list? Or what would you subtract? Given this perspective, when you choose an industry specialty at some point in your career, which do you think it would be wise to pursue, or avoid?
The second oldest profession will always be there!
Pimp?
Cosa Nostra?
Thank you for this
Great video. I like his line of argumentation. Thanks for sharing @Rhys da Vinci!
Seems like a smart guy
No predictions on what the waves will be?
Pimping and hoeing is the best things going....
But for real, I'd say clean energy. I've heard it said that if the Chinese were to fully develop and live like Americans, it would literally choke the energy out the Earth.
I think the problem with this (very common sense yet good idea) is that the waves are moving faster and will continue to move faster at a moderately exponential rate. Yeah, the PC wave was epic. It was slow moving though (relative to computer science now). Look at IT now. Who can keep up? There's always something new. Technology can become obsolete at the blink of an eye. Even things that aren't technology related can become obsolete that quickly, just because of where we are with technology. It is rather intimidating.
So, to take his advice and put it into a "now" context rather than a late 70's PC context: Get on that short term wave that will last somewhere between a few years and ten years to catapult your career, rather than serve your entire career. Either way, great advice and good post.
I think his point is that you should try to find a long wave, not one of the short tech waves you're talking about. Something like social networking is a short wave; something like sustainable energy will take several decades to play out.
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