![\"\"](\"http:\/\/betanews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/worker-bee-2-600x400.jpg\" "\\"worker")
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Yesterday was my 60th birthday. When I came to Silicon Valley I was 24. It feels at times like my adult life has paralleled the growth and maturation of the Valley. When I came here there were still orchards. You could buy cherries, fresh from the fields, right on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale. Apricot orchards surrounded Reid-Hillview Airport in San Jose, where I flew in those early days because hangars were already too expensive in Palo Alto. My first Palo Alto apartment rented for $142 per month, and I bought my first house there for $47,000. I first met Intel co-founder Bob Noyce when we were both standing in line at Wells Fargo Bank.<\/p>\n
Those days are gone.\u00a0But that is not to say that these days are worse.<\/p>\n
For almost 36 years people have asked me when is the best time to start a company and my answer has always been the same:\u00a0right now<\/em>. New technologies have yielded opportunities we could never have imagined and along the way lowered the cost of entry to the point where anyone with a good idea and a willingness to take risks has a chance to make it big.<\/p>\n These<\/em>\u00a0are the good old days.<\/p>\n And so it is time for me to move forward with my life and my so-called career. As a guy with three sons ages 10, 8, and 6, you see, my devil sperm has provided me the opportunity to work until I die. Or more properly it has determined that I must work until I am at least 76, when my last kid graduates from college. Whichever comes first.<\/p>\n A year ago I forecast my own retirement of sorts and so I\u2019m here today to explain better what that means, because it certainly doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019ll stop working or that I\u2019ll even go away.<\/p>\n Blogging no longer works for me as a career.\u00a0As I\u2019ve explained before<\/a>, declining ad rates have led to this being no longer a viable occupation, at least for me. So while I\u2019m not going completely away I have to assume even more duties that will limit, somewhat, my presence here. I hope you\u2019ll understand.<\/p>\n One thing I am about to do is write a book — a very serious book for a very real publisher who has written a very substantial check with the assumption that I\u2019ll deliver 120,000 words a year from today. I have to get it finished soon, you see, before book publishing dies in turn.<\/p>\n Then I have a new startup company —\u00a0The Startup Channel<\/em>\u00a0— which I hope you\u2019ll hear more of in coming weeks. We\u2019re about to close our seed round and if we don\u2019t then I\u2019ll just pay for the thing myself, it\u2019s that good an idea. I\u2019m open to investment proposals, by the way, but only accredited investors need apply, sorry (that\u2019s the law).<\/p>\n I\u2019ll continue to blog as often as I can, though mainly about startups, somewhat like I did a few years ago when my startup was Home-Account.com and the topics were mortgages and economics.<\/p>\n So you\u2019ll see more of me and less. I\u2019ll be working harder than ever. But why not? There\u2019 s plenty still to be done, and I don\u2019t feel a day over 59.<\/p>\n Reprinted with permission<\/i><\/p>\n Photo Credit:<\/strong> Joe Wilcox<\/p>\n Yesterday was my 60th birthday. When I came to Silicon Valley I was 24. It feels at times like my adult life has paralleled the growth and maturation of the Valley. When I came here there were still orchards. You could buy cherries, fresh from the fields, right on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale. Apricot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7434,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-640537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7434"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n<\/img><\/a>
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