Last week successful start-up founder and investor Marc Andreessen wrote an essay in the Wall Street Journal “Why Software is Eating the World”. In the article he examines the largest and fastest growing companies in a wide variety of traditional industries and explains how they are software businesses at their core.
“My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense.”
Leave it to a man much more intelligent than myself to put it so eloquently. But this is not an academic theory that should be taken at face value. It has real consequences on our lives and the lives of our children. Are you going to be able to adapt?
“Many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There’s no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.”
It sounds like he is making a direct pitch for Breakout Mentors! Having an understanding of how software works will be incredibly valuable no matter the industry. Make sure your students are starting early in a fun and creative environment!