So that's when you do things ridiculously different than other people. If you fail, you've still got this baseline of skills to fall back on, and you're indistinguishable from everyone else. If you succeed, you're very much distinguishable from everyone else, and that's worth a lot of money.
The same explosion of knowledge that open-source and github has spawned has created a wealth of new niches that are quite promising but generally underexploited. Everybody's piling into Ruby on Rails, Django, JavaScript, iPhone, and Android development. How many people are piling into things like computer vision, large-scale data mining, wearable computing, or robotics?
Search was not sexy in 1998. E-commerce was sexy. Everybody piled into E-commerce, which left the field wide open for Google to come in and clean up while Pets.com withered away and died.
Agreed. That is my current plan exactly. I'm heading off for 3-6 months in SE Asia to spend travelling, living cheaply and studying math & machine learning with the goal of coming back to the States later to either pursue a graduate degree or a gig doing ML/analysis.
The same explosion of knowledge that open-source and github has spawned has created a wealth of new niches that are quite promising but generally underexploited. Everybody's piling into Ruby on Rails, Django, JavaScript, iPhone, and Android development. How many people are piling into things like computer vision, large-scale data mining, wearable computing, or robotics?
Search was not sexy in 1998. E-commerce was sexy. Everybody piled into E-commerce, which left the field wide open for Google to come in and clean up while Pets.com withered away and died.