Perspicacity and benefits of jumping into tech trends

Within just over a decade in tech, I had the absolute pleasure to work on several tech waves: no-code apps with Appsheet, which got acquired by Google; and later both blockchain (2021) and generative AI (2023) within Google.

That year I got into crypto - with all the hype that surrounded it - changed my trajectory:

• I got exposed to opportunities I never would have otherwise;

• I grew my network at the multiples of scale I had before;

• I spoke at NFT NYC, with my name featured in Times Square;

  

The best outcome of that year, though, was realizing that picking up an emerging trend to a level of operational understanding is surprisingly simple*:

• Understand the fundamentals find the angle & bits that are interesting to you;

• Experiment with the top apps as a user, try to build something;

• Read people in the field on Twitter, Substack, etc.;

• Connect and interact with the noise on reddit, twitter, discord, internally within your company;

• Read some arxiv.org;

When the AI hype came around in late 2022, I saw that the emerging tech cycles are an endless loop of opportunities; once you get on one, it’s easy to get yeeted straight into another one:

• Your network naturally attracts notorious people, and once new trends emerge, some of them get organically involved in them;

• Your content diet starts surfacing these trends earlier than the mainstream content catches up;

• Your day-to-day work starts bumping into it;

• The market’s appetite for people who can run an experimental project with some level of experience grows overnight; but unlike the well-established fields of tech, expertise =/= 20 years of well-documented track record - it’s sometimes just having your hand on the pulse;

I started hypegeist as a means to an end: to learn more effectively through sharing, to spot trends sooner, to build a network of people equally excited about emerging tech. If that sounds like your wheelhouse:

Thanks for being here!

*Obviously there are people that spend years or decades in these fields; none of what I’d do would come close to their level of expertise. I’m lucky they’re in the field because we get to learn from them. But my point still stands - it only takes a few dedicated weeks to be able to understand the tech, work out your own angle with it, see its opportunities, start experimenting with a new project, or interview for a job.