"Why Now?"
A seed investor's questions boil down to "Why now, why you, why this?" Every time, market timing is right at the top of the list.
Like in any systems question, one needs to look both at trend and level to understand the market opportunity. In most entrepreneurship worth doing, market trends are long-term. Levels tend to change slowly - until they do so all at once.
An example of a market level is technical competence in the working-age population. This competence is primarily a matter of life experience - what percentage of working people can express sophisticated intent in a WIMP interface?
I am a generation X'er. I have been on the leading edge of technical literacy since an IBM PC made my acquaintance four decades ago. I learned to type proficiently before longhand. (In truth, I never really mastered the latter.)
My follow-on cohort, the millennials, grew up with video games and computers in the household much more widely. Not universally: this trend was not fair, and the difference in opportunity shows brightly in those who had this opportunity and those who did not.
The cohort after this one, Generation "Z," came of age in the era of the iPhone. Their idea of interacting with a machine was intuitive, direct, and ever-present. Primary interaction is through touch, voice, and vision. Soft keyboards mess up precise communication with auto-complete. Emojis and memes communicate a great deal using media easier to generate on the platform.
My children are growing up with a very different interaction with machines than I did. They started on tablets and immediately used the voice ability to express intent that the keyboard - and their limited spelling - made challenging. So we have been deliberate about what apps we allow on. They are excited for document assembly for making comic books. They love augmented reality to draw all through a room. And the puzzles that challenge their brain at a higher level encourage their quest for greater literacy rather than requiring it.
We started them on "coding time" around their fifth birthday. The boys began with puzzles and moving up to creative platforms like Tynker. "Block coding" platforms that owe their heritage to MIT's scratch are a natural fit for a touch-first generation. My boys move blocks around on a screen to articulate sophisticated control flow, operations, values, and variables. They have an intuitive understanding of nonlinear math that they can try to see what happens.
They refer to my technical time as "type-coding." This retronym got my attention, just as I imagine Walmart executives' heads turning when they first heard about "brick and mortar commerce." What is code now?
Breadth rather than its age defines the no-code generation. People across the cohorts above are part of it. They do not require the gates of advanced technical training - their lives are that training.
They were "coding" the whole time. Most were not using tools recognizable as such to the gatekeeper boomer and Xer coders, or even those millennials who are both consumers and creators of a new generation of ever-more-advanced tools.
This new generation, defined by their breadth rather than their age, is more comfortable with high-bandwidth content tools that convey more information far more briefly than an extended essay (hello!) or textbook.
In the workforce, the emerging trend is that technical competence - expressing control over machines rather than being directed by them - is now the center of the knowledge economy.
The opportunities to unleash their potential to create value are enormous. On the balance sheet, we can select the most knowledgeable contributors on the variable costs side of the house and apply them to automation and process creation. We get leverage on the business. The number of people we need to execute many of these tasks will go down further.
The next wave of development and efficiencies will not require engineering talent. However, domain experts can provide the value of engineers.
The end of engineering is not at hand - far from it! There is a great deal more value to be gotten from going deeper with more technical solutions. More use of tools means more demand for tools and toolmakers. What it does mean is that the market will pay more for ever-more arcane knowledge. But the less arcane knowledge will not hold value. We will not apply or pay for marginal technical skills - like most web development - the way we did in 2018. To be a successful technologist, one will need to go ever-deeper.
In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker identifies changes in relative costs and demographics as critical trends for entrepreneurial opportunity. This confluence of available tooling and pervasive technical competence in the population is a huge wave building all around us that I am thrilled to ride.
And for my children, the wave crashing on the shores means a world of more fantastic opportunities than I have yet imagined.
Time to get to work!