The Millennial SaaS-era Retrospective: Finale
"I'm a Millennial. You can't hurt me with financial despair." - Reddit user whichwitch9, one day after the Trump tariffs
Tech has always been a team sport.
Sure, it's easy to point at Jack Kilby as the individual inventor of the integrated circuit. It's a great story. Kilby doesn't have any summer vacation as he starts his job at Texas Instruments, so he spends his spare time fiddling with an idea he'd had while serving in the Army - eventually patenting the integrated circuit. But it's Robert Noyce and the Traitorous Eight of Fairchild Semiconductor who made the electronics industry what it would ultimately become. They were a team.
Kilby, Noyce, and the rest of the semiconductor generation grew up in the Great Depression. They came of age during World War II and the Korean War. Their coming of age years were shaped by haunting trauma that eventually became a set of values that would transform America. If it all might go up in smoke anyway, why not build something? Why not try to do one small thing to make things better?
When I started thinking through this series of blog posts, I had this nagging sensation, not even a thought yet, of what it needed to be. What I needed to do. I needed to put down what I thought my forties and fifties were going to look like. And in order to do that, I had to let go of how I thought my twenties and thirties were supposed to go.
I was always chasing some horizon, some magical place where I would feel fully tapped into the "scene." And as I wrote this, I realized that I had been part of it all along. The startups I built with friends never went anywhere, but I had fun doing them. That was the scene. I didn't have to live in San Francisco. I visited enough to develop a favorite burrito spot, and to know that I should never trust the weather in one neighborhood if I'm traveling to another. Tech was never about any of that anyway, and it was about all of it.
I live in a city now that was founded to supply prospectors looking to capitalize off the gold rush of 1858. The ski hills I frequent were old mining towns left behind when the gold ran out. The old brick buildings downtown were warehouses that held goods before they were shipped into the mountains. I am living among the ghosts of a prior gold rush.
This summer, there will likely be a dispute between Colorado and other western states over the use of water flowing down from the Rocky Mountains. American cities and farms are drying up, and that's a problem that will need solving.
American steel is being manufactured just south of here, in Pueblo, using solar power harnessed from the sun that never seems to stop shining here. We'll need ways to make that easier. We'll need to tap geothermal energy, too, and we've got abundant sources of hot springs here that are ripe for it.
The Comanche coal-fired power station closed in 2024, and it needs a replacement. We've got legislation out to make it easier for nuclear power to step in and fill the gap.
And all of this will need the collected knowledge and wisdom of generations past. We spent decades building tools to make that kind of information accessible and understandable. Large language models are making all that conversational, and hopefully, they'll be able to do even more than that.
I can't help but watch the mess coming out of my old haunt of DC right now. Another unfortunate self-inflicted crisis driven by greed and foolishness. I've seen it before. I saw it in 2008. I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now. Yet I also know that we got through it.
We built our way out. Never perfectly. Never free of failure. Late at night, after hours, sandwiched in between a thousand other stresses and responsibilities. Together.