Was about to say the same, in particular this:

> also: "The Silicon Valley of tomorrow will not look like that of today"

I came to live in Silicon Valley in the 80's. At the time, the technical press was bemoaning that the glory days were gone, making chips had become a race to the bottom, engineers were being laid off, and there wouldn't be enough jobs for the people who were already in the valley, much less the people in school who would graduate in 1 to 5 years with engineering degrees.

It bummed me out because I was at Intel, which seemed like a good company when I joined them out of school, but they were laying off people and it was "clear" that the semiconductor houses were going to consolidate down to nothing.

At the time I took a "big risk" and left an established company and joined a startup that seemed to be doing okay. At least they weren't losing money. It was called Sun Microsystems, they had just gone public (the Friday before I joined), and were less than 2,000 people. They were building these things called "Workstations" which everyone figured would fail because as soon as the "Big" companies (HP, IBM, and DEC) decided to get serious about this space it would squash them like a bug. They were doing some crazy things, like telling you all of their APIs and letting anyone copy them. They were using computer chips they bought from Motorola and running a University's version of the UNIX operating system on them. Their marketing message was simple, "We're open, we may not be here next month but don't worry because everyone has the information they need to make compatible stuff for our systems so even if we're dead, you can still use our gear."

It was a very different message than what the "big boys" were saying.

10 years later they were the "gorilla" and DEC, HP, and IBM were having a hard time keeping up. Then the Internet caught on an suddenly they were in a maelstrom of innovation and change and couldn't change with it. Ex-sun folks like to joke they became the dot "." in Oracle.com.

When the dot com crash hit I was older and had gone through the semi-conductor crash so I wasn't sure that this was "the end" as everyone was predicting. There would never be another VC who would be willing to risk giving you money. There would never be another retail investor that would buy and IPO for a company that wasn't making money. There was no "moat" or anyway to protect your market share so the only companies that would survive would be the distilled and conglomerated husks of the old dot com dinosaurs.

Then Google and Facebook exploded.

So what does it all mean?

It means that if this is the first time you've seen the phoenix burst into flames you will just know that its dead and there isn't any left to do but sweep up the ashes. But if this is your second, or third, or fourth, trip around the block you know that the last trip found a match between value and technologies ability to deliver it with enough margin to support building a company. And you know that people are going to spend what they earn and there will be new things to do and new ways to spend. If you can see the things that made gave the market wings over the last 10 years, often there are hints about the next thing that will generate the excitement.

And if you can't, that is okay because the person that can? They are going to need talented engineers to help them bring it to market and make it work. There is something magical about taking $0.02 cents of electricity and turning it into something someone will buy for $1. People that can internalize the value of information will understand how to capture value while building new products. And that in turn will fund an entirely new ecosystem of businesses, large and small.

There is nothing more creative, and innovative, than a group of engineering friends with too much time on their hands.