I left Entrepreneur First a year ago, and since then my perspective on life has changed a lot. I used to think that the most exciting thing about technology was the potential it gives individual people. You can start something which reaches billions of people, makes you billions of dollars, and 'changes the world'.
That's still true, and still exciting. But now I think maybe it gets the future the wrong way around. What's exciting about technology is not the entrepreneurs at the head of the income graph. What's exciting is the creation of an enormous long tail of people who, for the first time in human history, will do their life's work.
Why jobs suck
Doing something you love has mostly been a fantasy since jobs existed. Without technology, by definition, it's almost impossible to get paid to do something you love.
Without technology, if you love doing something weird, you probably can't find someone who'll pay you to do it. If you can find someone who'll pay, your thing can't be that weird after all. But, if it's not weird, you're probably not the best person who does it. And if you're not the best, why would someone pay you to do it?
This is why most jobs suck. It's almost impossible to find people who'll pay you to do what you love. At least, it was.
Why they won’t
With technology, being weird doesn't matter anymore. Even if the thing you love is super weird, the kind of thing only 0.1% of people love, there's still ¬800,000 other people who love it. 800,000 people who are now on the internet.
Because of technology, the weirdest thing you love now has an internet city bigger than Stockholm, entirely populated with weirdos like you. If you could somehow get 0.1% of those 800,000 people to pay you a tad over 5$ a month, you'd already earn the average US income.
Get paid more than most Americans, for doing something you love. If you hate your job - and you probably do - why on earth wouldn't you try this?
Well, you would. With technology, the market for weird gets bigger than the market for normal. After moving online, the market for books that are not even sold in the average book store became larger than the market for books that are. Weird is what Shopify, Patreon, Spotify, Amazon Marketplace, Substack, Twitch, and a hundred other platforms are made for.
Millions of jobs that never existed before, exist. Some positions are already taken - pundits, writers, musicians. But most are vacant, for now.
Sooner or later, millions of workers will stop doing things they hate and start doing things they love. Factory workers will become zany backyard scientists, green grocers will become eccentric modern artists, and checkout staff will become controversial economic historians.
Most won't be rich - they might even earn less than they do now. But they will exist. And, historically speaking, that is magical. They are no longer workers, they are doing their life's work.
The Weird World
A life's work might not make a lot of money, but it can make the world better. Science and art and history and a million things I can't think of, matter. After all, they're the things we love doing! And more people than ever will be doing them.
In the startup world, it’s tradition to talk about being contrarian. I used to live in the world where ‘contrarian’ venture capitalists $100m bought ten startup Series As, a negative rate of return, and a hard lesson. Now, I just want to live in the world where weirdos spend $100m on thousands of other weirdos doing what they love.
I've stopped worrying so much about how to change the world. I just hope you and I take the chance to do our life's work.
Thanks to Matt Clifford, Arnaud Schenk, and Ben Clifford for feedback on this.