I’m Bored. What’s Next?

It's just about 2013 and I gotta say, I'm a little bored.

At least, the blogger in me is. As an investor things are just peachy. All this panic about overpriced consumer startups has led to a nice softening of the market (periodic reports of Blubbles are great for that). And other sectors, like business to business, is still under capitalized v. the consumer sector.

But as a consumer and observer of tech, things feel very 2002ish to me. There's been a lot of belt tightening, for example, as many startups are trying to make their seed rounds stretch just a little bit longer.

But it's more than that. I just don't see the tons of crazy new ideas that I did a few years ago. Things that are genuinely new and interesting.

Yeah, yeah, mobile. I get it. Everything's mobile these days. LET'S GO MO-BILE! But really that's just an IQ test. When you see bold new startups with nothing but a desktop strategy you know they just don't get it and you move on.

But really a lot of the mobile stuff out there is just radioactive decay from the iPhone launching in 2007.

2007!

Old news! Ancient platforms!

Yeah, the iPhone and Android are great. But seriously, look at the top headline grabbers in tech news in 2012. Apple. Google. Facebook. Microsoft. Christ. It might as well still be 2007.

I don't want to read any more stories about how Facebook cloned something they couldn't buy. Or that Twitter banned something that they tried to buy but Facebook got there first. Or the press regurgitating how Google+ is somehow not flailing. Or about the number of Android v. iPhone devices. Or Samsung's patent mishaps. Or how Yahoo is winding down things in Asia.

I certainly don't want to, for example, spend another minute debating Hunter Walk on the nuances of social graphs or whether we should be given a way to efficiently remove friends from Facebook.

For two other examples look at the post directly below this one, and (in a few minutes) the one directly above. Snoozers!

I want something completely new and different to happen, and lots of it. Stuff that makes us change the way we think about a market, or the world. Something that inspires a new generation of crazy startups doing crazy things.

I don't want to be completely negative on the tech world today. And I have seen some pretty amazing things over the last year that really are indistinguishable from magic. We've even invested in a few of them. But it's very early days yet.

And we need more. Lots more. Paradigm shifting stuff that has almost zero chance of succeeding. Which is ok. Because whoever tries this stuff (and fails) will certainly land on their feet, and they'll have great stories to tell their grandchildren.

If you want to build a startup that has a good chance of succeeding, don't listen to me. Listen to Paul Graham and others who are applying tons of data to the idea of startup success. That will maximize your chance of being successful.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for flying boats. Or something to improve my memory. And the last great human invention, 100% realistic virtual reality via a brain-computer interface. Because once we plug into that, most of us will probably never unplug.

Which is fine. We're probably all just living in a computer simulation anyway. We might as well have some fun while we're at it.

We live in an age where we expect and experience exponential change in tech. Where common every day items were just fantasies (or unimagined) decades ago. Let's speed things up, people. I'm bored.