Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 1985 when almost any dot com name you wanted was available? All words; short ones, cool ones. All you had to do was ask. It didn’t even cost anything to claim. This grand opportunity was true for years. In 1994 a Wired writer noticed that mcdonalds.com was still unclaimed, so with our encouragement he registered it, and then tried to give it to McDonalds, but their cluelessness about the internet was so hilarious it became a Wired story. Shortly before that I noticed that abc.com was not claimed so when I gave a consulting presentation to the top-floor ABC executives about the future of digital I told them that they should get their smartest geek down in the basement to register their own domain name. They didn’t.

The internet was a wide open frontier then. It was easy to be the first in category X. Consumers had few expectations, and the barriers were extremely low. Start a search engine! An online store! Serve up amateur videos! Of course, that was then. Looking back now it seems as if waves of settlers have since bulldozed and developed every possible venue, leaving only the most difficult and gnarly specks for today’s newcomers. Thirty years later the internet feels saturated, bloated, overstuffed with apps, platforms, devices, and more than enough content to demand our attention for the next million years. Even if you could manage to squeeze in another tiny innovation, who would notice it?

Yet if we consider what we have gained online in the last 30 years, this abundance smells almost miraculous. We got: Instant connection with our friends and family anywhere, a customizable stream of news whenever we want it, zoomable 3D maps of most cities of the world, an encyclopedia we can query with spoken words, movies we can watch on a flat slab in our pocket, a virtual everything store that will deliver next day — to name only six out of thousands that could be mentioned.

But, but…here is the thing. In terms of the internet, nothing has happened yet. The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning. If we could climb into a time machine and journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we’d realize that most of the greatest products running the lives of citizens in 2044 were not invented until after 2014. People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say, oh, you didn’t really have the internet (or whatever they’ll call it) back then.

And they’d be right. Because from our perspective now, the greatest online things of the first half of this century are all before us. All these miraculous inventions are waiting for that crazy, no-one-told-me-it-was-impossible visionary to start grabbing the low-hanging fruit — the equivalent of the dot com names of 1984.

Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh, “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!”

So, the truth: Right now, today, in 2014 is the best time to start something on the internet. There has never been a better time in the whole history of the world to invent something. There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside, than now. Right now, this minute. This is the time that folks in the future will look back at and say, “Oh to have been alive and well back then!”

The last 30 years has created a marvelous starting point, a solid platform to build truly great things. However the coolest stuff has not been invented yet — although this new greatness will not be more of the same-same that exists today. It will not be merely “better,” it will different, beyond, and other. But you knew that.

What you may not have realized is that today truly is a wide open frontier. It is the best time EVER in human history to begin.

You are not late.

你能想象在1985年的时候，作为一名创业者，任何你想注册的域名都还尚未被注册是一件多爽的事情么？所有域名，短的域名，酷的域名。你唯一要做的就是去索要这些域名，甚至你连注册费都不用花。这个捡钱机会曾经存在了数年。在1994年，一个作家极其兴奋的注意到mcdonalds.com还没被注册，在我们的鼓励下，他注册了这个域名，然后尝试拿去给麦当劳，但是麦当劳的人不买单，当然最后这成了一个非常励志的故事。在此前不久，我注意到abc.com尚未注册，当我在ABC的顶层办公楼给他们公司的高管展示域名的时候，我告诉了他们关于数字时代的来临——他们应该让公司最聪明的极客躲在地下室里面把所有和他们公司业务相关的域名都注册。但他们不听。




互联网那时候是个自由开放的处女地。你很容易成为未来的巨头，那时候用户对产品的期望很低，障碍也很少。做一个搜索引擎！一个线上商店！提供视频服务！当然，那只是那时候。现在来看，第一批吃螃蟹的人好像已经把所有地方变成了红海，只留下了最困难和不容易看到盈利模式的领域给今天的新来者，三十年来，互联网早已被数量庞大的应用程序，平台和设备给填充的过于饱和。产生的内容足够我们看上一百万年，即使你在某一方面的创意有过人之处，但是谁会注意呢？


是的，如果我们回首过去的三十年，在互联网上面得到了些什么，我们会说，其丰富和多姿多彩让我们觉得这真是个奇迹。我们不仅可以随时随地自由的联系我们的朋友家人，我们还可以定制自己想要的信息流，轻松浏览全世界主要城市的3D地图，在百科全书里面查询我们所说的每一个字，口袋里的设备就可以让我们享受一部电影，虚拟的实物商店不日就会上线——我只提了千万个互联网奇迹中的六个。



但是，但是，不得不说一件事，在互联网上，真正的大事还未发生。互联网还是处在最开始阶段。如果我们能坐上时间机器去未来三十年旅行，然后从那个时代看我们今天，我们就会发现，2044年大多数人热衷的产品，很少有在2014年之前诞生的。未来的人们会看着他们的平台，虚拟现实的可穿戴设备，可以被下载的感官体验，还有智能的机器人，然后对穿越过来的人说，噢，你们那时候真没有互联网(不管你们当年是不是这么叫)。


他们是对的。从我们现在的角度看，前半个世纪以来最伟大的互联网产品都是在我们之前产生的。所有那些能让人为之疯狂的伟大产品和不可思议的发明，都在等待那些疯狂的，珍视那些无人重视的东西的梦想者开始去吸取那些随手可得的，就像1984年的域名一样的资源。


2044年的人们还会告诉你，“你知道在2014年当一个创业者是一件多么爽的事情么，那时候互联网是个完全开放的处女地！你几乎可以选择任何的领域，然后加点人工智能，放在云端。那时候很少有设备拥有超过两个传感器，不像现在的，几乎每个设备都搭载了超过一百个传感器。那时候用户期望和成本控制都很低，你很容易当上这个领域的巨头”，然后他们会感叹，“噢，如果那时我们能认识到一切事情的无限可能就好了”

真相是：现在，今天，2014，此刻仍是互联网创业的最好时机。历史上从未有过比现在更好的时机让你去创造点什么。历史上从未有像现在这么好的机会，这么多开放的资源，这么低廉的成本，这么高的利润率，这么优厚的福利，这么友好的各方支持，我说的就是现在，这一分钟。这个时代是未来人们会说“好好活着回去开干吧”的时代。


过去的三十年是个了不起的开始，并且人们会由此开始，创造出真正伟大的东西。但是，最酷的东西并未诞生——虽然最新的伟大产品和现在已有的东西看上去可能相差无几。但它不只是『更好』而已，它会在本质上有所不同，但是你会感受到它的伟大。

可能你还没意识到，这个时代真的是黄金时代。这是人类从未有过的最好的时代。

现在，正是时候