What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years

Chris Dixon's argument is that a lot of foundational tech started as weekend projects. He points to the PC, the web, blogs, and most open source software as examples of things hobbyists built in garages and dorm rooms before they became large industries. His core claim is that this pattern isn't an accident. Businesses vote with dollars and chase near-term returns, while engineers vote with their time and chase interesting new things. Hobbies, he argues, are where the smartest people spend effort when they aren't tethered to quarterly targets, which makes them a reliable early signal of where the next industries will come from. To make the point concrete, Dixon lists the hobbyist projects he sees gaining momentum in 2013: math-based currencies like Bitcoin, NoSQL databases as a new class of developer tools, the internet of things, 3D printing, touch-free human-computer interfaces, and the artisanal hardware being funded on Kickstarter. He doesn't attach market sizes or adoption numbers to these, so the piece works more as a thesis than as evidence. The bet is that these side pursuits will seed businesses, and the title sums it up: what the smartest people do on weekends becomes the weekday routine of everyone else about a decade later. The article is short and the reasoning is mostly analogical. Its strength is the historical pattern it draws on, since the PC and the web really did grow out of enthusiast communities. Its weakness is that survivorship bias is baked in. Plenty of hobbyist projects from any given year never amount to anything, and Dixon doesn't address how to tell the ones that will matter from the ones that won't. Read it as a useful framing for spotting early trends rather than a prediction you can act on directly.