meric

Good question. Big companies participate in incrementalism. Many companies invent one big thing and ride it for decades. Few build new things and succeed. (e.g. Apple). Some try, e.g. Microsoft with Xbox, Meta with VR, but even then often it ends up being billions of lost profits. Innovation often come from small groups of persistent and intelligent people and their first few acquisitions as they succeed. e.g. Microsoft with DOS, Windows and Office. They're still riding it.

The last startup boom began in the mid-2000's (around when Y Combinator began, you can read all about it on Paul's blog), when cloud computing was still new and lowered the cost of creating online businesses. It was also in the wake of the tech bust - a lot of tech employees became unemployed.

My view is, when the layoffs complete, the dust settles and you have millions of tech workers who are willing to accept only equity, with a new technology they can rent for $200 a month from DeepSeek or Anthropic or OpenAI, we may see the green shoots of a new wave of disruption.

A builder may use bricks to build a house - yet he may still be interested in the brick's composition & the brick making method.

These days, he may even use a brick robot to automate bricklaying, and still be interested in the mortar used.

Same for software ?

The most notable theocracies - Iran and Saudi Arabia, do fairly well compared to the other two forms of government. I wonder why they're do better than one might expect.

Amazon Aurora seems to fit.

There are a number of open source projects looking for contributors. I know wesnoth.org is one. The downside of contributing to open source projects full time is you will have to find alternative income.

One example I can imagine you can help with: if your city doesn't have it, you could put its train timetables in an app. There's one for Sydney, it's called TripView. A train timetable available in a convenient manner will help people rely on trains more and reduce CO2 emissions.

Do you have a personal website? Leave one here; Who knows maybe someone reading your post would hit you up in the next few weeks.

What about cashflows including goods or services?

You can get some working experience doing freelance gigs. You could probably find better ones than upwork.com, but otherwise, do some jobs there, do bigger and bigger ones, until you've got a couple of 1-month long gigs and some good reviews. Then go after the 1-2 year work experience ones. The lower end you go, the less onerous the requirements are, and it's possible you can build up your work experience that way.

I think if you have a kid later on you'd worry less about growing old and more about making sure your kid grows old.