Back in the summer of 2001 when I was in my final year of university, I had a part-time job at an internet cafe. It was in a dingy old pub with prehistoric computers and a barely-better-than-dialup connection shared amongst fifteen computers. Because it was such a crappy internet cafe no-one ever really went there. So I found myself with plenty of time to learn Photoshop, HTML and to dabble in PHP.

At that time the Dotcom Bubble had recently burst and though there were some ragged survivors like Amazon, the majority of the high flying, aeron buying, dotcom elite had come and gone. I used to sit in my internet cafe waiting for the nonexistent customers and think, “If only I had gotten into this web stuff five years ago, then I could have been part of all that excitement!”

In my youthful naivete, I was convinced that the time for web startups had passed and I’d missed the boat. Sure it was a boat that eventually crashed at full speed right into the docks, but what a ride it must have been!

Fast forward five years, and after two jobs as a web designer and a stint as a freelancer I found myself at the dawn of that second great web era – Web 2.0. This time around I discovered I was suddenly at the right place at the right time with the right skills. Yes, it’s missing the crazy hype and some of the premature enthusiasm and energy of the Dotcom bubble, but ultimately it has turned out to be a better time for little startups like mine.

In his fantastically readable book “Outliers – the Story of Success“, Malcolm Gladwell illustrates how there have been ideal times to be working in particular industries. He shows that programmers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were not just brilliant entrepreneurs, but that importantly they took advantage of being around at a particular time with a particular set of skills and opportunities.

Now I’m no Gates or Jobs, but I do know that this is a golden period for the web. These are the years that our future selves will look back at and say “Boy that was an exciting time online!” There are simply so many opportunities for people with the skills to create great products. The barriers to entry are exceedingly low allowing developers, designers, bloggers, and all manner of people with particular enthusiasm, skill and drive to build successful businesses online.

But it won’t last. Over time the more obvious opportunities slowly dry up and the barriers rise. To get in on the action you have to be increasingly advanced, well funded and creative.

I would argue that the web right now however is still wide open. Just look at how Twitter has come out of left field to become a massive internet phenomena in just three short years. There are still many, many untapped opportunities.
So I’ll end this post to say that if you’ve wondered whether you should make a go of a particular idea you have, I say yes! If you’re going to go for it, go for it now! Sure we won’t all be Twitters or Facebooks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t build some neat little startups, grow sustainable businesses and live to tell the tale of how we helped build the internet in the heady days of 2009!

Posted by Press Dept
Tags: internet, jobs, money, web

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 30th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Company News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.