I have been involved with technology for exactly 30 years this fall. My first job was a “Micro-computer Analyst” with Ultramar – a UK based Oil & Gas company. I had the fortune to catch the absolute ground zero of the personal computing revolution; proud to have carried a screw driver and to have known how to flip dip switches on a 512K (K!) memory expansion board for an IBM AT.
Reflecting back on the years, there have been 3 great epochs: Personal Computing, The Internet and most recently, Social/Mobile. I have been involved in all.
I am super excited to be healthy and relevant {enough} to participate in the fourth. I call it the Getting Sh!t Done {GSD!}. The basic thesis of GSD! is that these past 30 years have simply been about “plumbing” and now it’s time to solve some really hard problems.
Machine Learning, Global Collaboration and Digital Natives meet Big Problems – Health Care, Energy, Food and Education. Sciences begin to mesh: Biology and medicine meets computing science meets material science. Behavioral Sciences meets machine learning meets big data.
The GSD! era will see very smart people and new thinking applied to new and old problems with incredibly capable and accessible tools. The great new entrepreneurs will not be plumbers or the technocrats. They will be the “Meshers” and “Collaborators” who see the adjacencies and will understand and exploit the edges of where previous silos of culture, science and technology intersect. Think Elon Musk.
As my buddy Ken says, “Game on!”