[JakeAl]

I did some consulting and tried starting my own company but I don't have the resources (co-founders, money, programming skills) and the market is dramatically different today.

Funding until 2020 was chasing the next big thing, (VR/AR/XR, Crypto, Metaverse, NFT, now AI) and after 2020 the US has been in an economic death spiral due to our debt to GDP ratio so there's a lot of competition for a lot less money and more and more the products are just infrastructure as markets are contracting. Even my peers who still have their own companies are fighting over or collaborating on/for scraps tossed to them by the giants like Amazon, Google or Microsoft.

It's a much longer nuanced discussion but the summary is if I had the resources I could create and build something great but we are no longer in an economy where large investment takes large risks to create a better/revolutionary version of Facebook or Twitter or the digital advertising industry that doesn't rely on antiquated or exploitive business models (sunken costs). That's not to say there aren't opportunities and I don't have killer revolutionary ideas, there's just a lot of barriers to entry. No one can afford the risk these days. It's something I've struggled with since before even Facebook existed.