Nineteen80 Origins

Welcome to the origin story for Nineteen80, a company formed and founded by Daniel Hoang. In this podcast, we'll explore, do some sense-making, and try to understand the world.

In this first episode, I talk about the name of my company and its origin story.

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Transcript

I'm Daniel Hoang. This is the 1980 podcast.

Let's start with the reason why this company is called 1980. I was born in 1980, but I'm also has Xennial. It's a generation known as the Oregon trail generation, according to Wikipedia. It's a micro-generation of people in the cusp, gen X and the millennials formerly known as gen Y. It can be as late as 1977 to, as early as 1983, somewhere within that range.

But the general description is people that have had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood. I remember as a child going into our internet service provider and getting a demonstration of. The internet and seeing email for the first time. And we did a little demonstration Mara. We came into the, um, internet service provider's office and he opened up his computer and pulled out some terminal and he sent off a message saying hello or something to that effect to someone in Berkeley and a few moments later, it came back.

In that moment. I remember just being completely and utterly dumbfounded on what just happened because you know, prior to that, we lived in an analog world,

rotary phones, dial phones, all concept of a wireless phone was just miraculously weird. And then now we're sending a message that. Instantaneously went down thousands of miles to another location and came back all with a minute or so. Of course, we, we look back and we think that's silly today.

We're completely full of emails all day long, but back then, that was just a complete revolutionarily change. The concept of the information super highway. That's what we call the internet back then just really change the paradigms of this world. We're able to send and communicate messages instantaneously, or the best thing we had was probably a fax machine that could send paper back and forth over an analog line.

We were moving to this digital line, uh, converting with a modem. It's a little dial-up modem. You're converting a digital signals over copper analog lions, sending that all the way down to another location and back. Completely changed. And so as a child, I lived in an analog world, you know, where the phone was, the norm, just dialing things up.

Um, I remember using a phone book when you schedule meetings or you schedule getting together, it was, you set a time and you remember to go there. You didn't have a smartphone, you didn't have something reminding you. In fact phones were all landlines back then. And then as I entered adulthood, things change in 2007.

At that time I was 27. Steve Jobs had introduced the internet communicator, the iPod, and a, was it internet device, iPod, and something else. And he called it the iPhone. And I remember seeing Steve bomber making fun of it. $600 phone, completely celly doesn't even have a keyboard, but when I got one of my self and I looked at it and I was like, this device is really going to change the world.

Now it didn't have the same impact as seeing email for the first time seeing something transport, but it was kind of that next generation where. The phone or the cell phone used to be just to communicate back and forth, possibly send a small text message, SMS, short message service. Um, and then now we're able to send it and use this device and have access to the world's information in our pocket.

It will slow, of course, you know, when it first came out and it was using the two G network. And so things were pretty slow, but the concept of loading up a web page on your phone was very foreign over time. This devices increased every year or two or so it doubles in speed, just like Moore's law. You know, you're getting technology, that's increasing exponentially. So I entered adulthood in my prime years that these devices were coming out prior to the iPhone. I remember being in graduate school and the Facebook was available.

And also just a new concept. It's like, what is this? I don't know what that says. Um, we were just at the cusp of that and was, I was entering adulthood. That was my formative years where my view of the world was different. And at the peak of my former years, um, these two major technologies, social media, the iPhone, or eventually a smartphone, or now we just call it a phone.

Um, became the part of my life. And so one of the benefits of being a millennial and the traits is when I grew up technology just didn't work. Um, technologies did not work at all. You had to troubleshoot it, you had to work on it and you had to poke around with it. We built our own computers. The software crashed all the time.

It's on my adult and childhood. I learned all these skills and how to troubleshoot and work with technology, just knowing it doesn't work. And then now, today, when Apple released the iPhone, their whole premises, it just works it's magic. And that is how the world has changed. I think

today we expect acknowledges to just function. We've kind of even lost the ability to troubleshoot and work through issues. And so one of the benefits of bridging these two generations is I grew up in a world where I had a troubleshoot to figure things out, take it apart, put it back together. You really needed to know how the inside or the engine works in order to run the engine.

And so that's one of the benefits. But let's fast forward into where we S I'm seeing the future and Wilson go from there.

Now for 1980, I see the world slightly different I'm of a certain age, where I had a troubleshoot and fix the world bridging two generations. Now I'm looking at. Millennials gen Z. I mean, these are digital natives, right? And that's the, just, they were born in a digital world. They were born in a world when the iPhone was existing.

They grew up with the iPhone. They grew up in social media. And so a lot of amazing things are happening with millennials, gen Z, I think recently with President Trump and, um, Getting all caught up in his rally. I think gen Z played a big role in it, you know, hacking the internet, creating more tickets than necessary at his rally.

And no one's showing up incredibly powerful generation, but I think how do we bridge this generation between this futuristic generation that has no regard for our politics? No regard for the. Old guard. And then you have the, the old gardens, the boomers, okay. Boomer, that phrase, not getting out of power, not getting out of the way.

Holding us back. 1980 is a bridge company. We use storytelling. We use different techniques, but for the most part, my general vision for 1980 is mining a way to bridge these two. Major big gaps within our generation's bringing the best of an analog world. I remember a world where relationships matter and being in person matters.

And now with the pandemic going on, I might actually be the generation that remembers what a world before Covin was, what it was like to be in person without fear of getting infected.

1980 was born out of. Two generations always straddling the space between two worlds. I'm not a digital native, I came of age in it. I'm not an old school curmudgeon because I came of age in a digital wall. I know what powerful, powerful things that digital things can do.

And so I'm sending it home in my home office and just missing that moment where. There was that ambient background sound of people talking in the office, just that noise it's gone because we're sitting at home. There's no people around, we're socially isolated and I'm struggling, but I think how do we get back the best of that world and move forward and always be moving forward.

And that's whole part of 1980.  I thank you for joining me in this journey. Now, this podcast is gonna be slightly different, cause I'd like to be able to narrate and help make sense of things in a world. There's plenty of podcasts out there interviewing experts, just getting great interviews entertaining sometimes.

But lacking some of that sense-making because there's just too much, too many podcasts. People like marketers, like Gary V saying publishing 64 pieces of content a day, a podcast being graded in all the time. I am productions low in productions, millions of videos left and right. How do you know how to make sense of this world?

This podcast? Is really about sense-making, I'm trying to make sense of what's going on and trying to bring in some of the learnings that the past embracing the power of the future, pulling us back a little bit. Let's use technology to help us not just to be with technology because of its sake, and then not always putting 100% on just people.

It's not always about people. Technology brings the ability to create transformative change. We can really take the world to a whole new place and we know how to embrace the capabilities of technology. Just like that moment, when I saw email for the first time, and then I was odd, inspired and saw all the possibilities we are at that cusp right now, technology is reaching to that point of a journey.

Or we should be an arm with it and we can imagine what is possible and knowing that whatever we can imagine we can create. And so let's imagine something great. Welcome to 1980.