Mark Zuckerberg got me into programming.

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. - Mark 10:21

The year is 2006, I’m an acne-faced 18-year-old high school senior sitting in American History class. A popular girl walks into the classroom wearing a shirt that says “Facebook” with a clicked like button below the blue logo. The other popular kids seem enthusiastic about the shirt. Ever the outcast, I’m clueless about what “Facebook” is, and honestly, I didn’t care. Fast forward, 2008 I’m enrolled in community college, taking my Statistics class and about 15 credits away from my Associate's Degree. Everywhere on the News is talk about Facebook surpassing MySpace for the largest social network and how this young 24 year old, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard and is about to become the youngest self-made billionaire ever. I dropped out of college that same day. Looking back I should’ve just changed majors.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, he explains how life-changing decisions are made in an instant. In my 20-year-old brain, college was a waste of time unless I intended to become a brain surgeon or rocket scientist. The strategy is simply to create a startup. The Facebook IPO instantly began the 2010s Tech Startup boom that reliably churned out more billionaires in the tech space than in any other industry in the history of the world. Every day there was a new group of billionaires. Names like Instagram, Uber, Tinder, WhatsApp, and Snapchat came out of nowhere with these massive valuations. Unfortunately, my company didn’t make the cut but man did it seem easy. Remember Flappy Bird? I’m not saying Mark Zuckerberg is Tech Jesus but if we’re being totally honest, he started it all.

When Facebook changed the name of their parent company to Meta another instant shift happened in the tech space and the metaverse was born. What is the Metaverse? The latest Silicon Valley buzzword is a merger of core technologies advanced in the previous decade. It is a combination of the Internet Of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, 5G & Moore’s Law. The metaverse isn’t just a buzzword, it is the inevitable evolution of the internet. It’s more than NFTs and VR goggles, it’s the shift in how we communicate using technology. The Internet Of Things aspect provides glasses, goggles, and bodysuits that receive real-time data and react accordingly. The blockchain provides NFTs that secure assets, smart contracts, and incentive models that create trustless reward mechanisms. Augmented Reality creates digital elements in the real world. Virtual reality is a 360-degree interactive environment. Artificial Intelligence allows features, assets, and environments to have logic that improves the experience of the metaverse over time. 5G allows for nearly instant communication and real-time feedback. Finally, Moore’s Law guarantees that technology will continue to get smaller and more powerful. What looks like a Janky headset today becomes ray ban sunglasses tomorrow and contact lenses the day after. The metaverse is the tech boom of the 2020 decade and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

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