You Ain’t Hip; You’re Old

Every couple of weeks I find that something that I thought was highly complicated had been rendered simple.

Each time it happens, I beat myself up a little for losing a bit of my curiosity.

For those of us that work in technology know that everything gets better faster. Speeds accelerate; communication accelerates; information flows more freely.

Yet, as humans, we get “set in our ways,” and stop being curious around things that we are “happy with the way they are.”

When I was ten years old, I got my first computer. It was a big deal in our house, given we only were able to afford it because my dad worked at Stanford and somehow he got to take one home.

It was a TRS-80, with a 5'4" drive, and the first time I fired it up, it had an green screen and a blinking cursor.

“Now what?”

“Now you read the instruction manual.”

That was how my dad taught me to be curious. I, of course, learned that it was up to me to never be out done.

A little bit before that, my dad and I used to go to the dump and search for cool stuff. To my mother’s chagrin, we had a ton of things in our house that we rescued from the dump. My dad, a ham radio operator, used to find interesting radio parts. One day, he found a brown Atari Pong machine. (For you old people, it had the orange logo and played only Pong). After my dad finally got it working, I asked, “Now what?”

“Now you read the instruction manual.”

I did, and I dominated in that game. I decided then that I would never get beaten in a video game by anyone. I loved video games, and continue to play to this day. I even tried to code one as a kid.

My victory streak lasted into my late twenties, when the words “My controller is broken!” seemed to come out of my mouth much more often.

I fight with myself more and more to continue to be curious about the world. I taught myself how to brew a cup of coffee; and now I am learning about building a high school.

And all around me, there is a explosion of startups driven by young people who are looking to me for advice. What advice can I give? Yes, I have the advice of experience, and I sort of see the world in easy lines and connections, but my curiosity muscles seem to be a bit crickity.

And its not just me. I see the advice that older mentors, advisors and investors give, and sometimes you can just see that the innovation is just not there.

The advice is staying the same, while the world is constantly changing.

This is what I got when I read Andrew’s Growth Hacker post. Not that the world has changed, but that WE ALL KNEW IT. The reaction was a mix of young entrepreneurs saying “Yah, dude, we know!” and old dudes saying “Exactly! See, we are still hip.”

And its not just grey hair or age that makes an entrepreneur old. The things that worked last year (SEO, SEM, SMM for example) are played and useless this year. I sat down with an startup founder recently in LA who said that he would dominate customer acquisition because he was an SEM/SEO master.

He won’t. That channel is dead. But, I also listened to a super successful investor tell him that SEO/SEM was the best way to drive low-cost customer acquisition. I cringed.

Startupland is no longer driven by the hustlers and built by the hackers. Everyone has to be a hacker now. Everything, absolutely everything is a hack waiting to be exploited and then closed. And the hacks? They live for a moment. Its a real-life Dade vs. the Gibson all while Plague is screaming “Die Dickweed.”

I’m old. I get beat at video games. I spend less time being amazed by the world and curious if I can make my dogs and the raccoon in the tree friends.

But, I’m still hip. Dammit. Now quiet down, I need my sleep.