Willem's Avenue

It takes time

There are a ton of examples of good ideas that were ahead of their time. I'm always humbled by the brilliance of humanity to continue to innovate, compound and apply knowledge in new domains to build incredible products and experiences.

Sometimes it's a drastic change in habits and usage. Pets.com and Chewy.com show what mobile internet revolution will do to a business model.

Sometimes more compute will take a good idea, like neural networks, an idea from the 1970's and allow us to create something amazing like GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion.

Sometimes you have to grind away at a product and business like Figma until both browser technology and work habits evolve to a sufficient degree that the experience is magical and transformative.

Sometimes you need decades of cryptographic improvements layered on top of each other to build something like the blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs.

Sometimes you need to spend 15 years building massive cloud services to realize a vision that Sun Microsystems had with their internet desktop becomes a reality with Chrome OS.

Sometimes it's advances in battery density and manufacturing excellence that allow us to do sub-millimeter precision engineering, giving us beautiful devices like the iPhone.

This is why I love technology!