I spent 12 years in the microchip business, specifically from 2000 to 2012. My friends and I built our own chip startup in 2004 and sold the company in 2008, before the Lehman shock. By the time of the exit of my startup, semiconductor startups were disappearing, due to the departure of VC investments. I remember the last massive wave of VC semiconductor investments, into a now largely forgotten standard called UWB (Ultra-wideband). That means all founders got burnt too.

We just finished our Lean LaunchPad class at UC Berkeley's engineering school where many of the teams embedded machine learning technology into their products. It struck me as I watched the teams try to find how their technology would solve real customer problems, is that machine learning is following a similar pattern of previous technical infrastructure innovations. Early entrants get sold to corporate acquirers at inflated prices for their teams, their technology, and their tools. Later entrants who miss that wave have to build real products that people want to buy. I've lived through several technology infrastructure waves; the Unix business, the first AI and VR waves in the 1980's, the workstation wave, multimedia wave, the first internet wave.

We just finished our Lean LaunchPad class at UC Berkeley's engineering school where many of the teams embedded machine learning technology into their products. It struck me as I watched the teams try to find how their technology would solve real customer problems, is that machine learning is following a similar pattern of previous technical infrastructure innovations. Early entrants get sold to corporate acquirers at inflated prices for their teams, their technology, and their tools. Later entrants who miss that wave have to build real products that people want to buy. I've lived through several technology infrastructure waves; the Unix business, the first AI and VR waves in the 1980's, the workstation wave, multimedia wave, the first internet wave.