7 frighteningly ambitious startup ideas:
- new search engine
- replace email
- replace universities
- internet drama
- the next Steve Jobs
- bring back moore’s law
- ongoing diagnosis
big and clever
in 1909, Joseph Schumpeter said that small companies were more inventive.
in 1942 he reversed himself: big firms have more incentive to invest in new products, he decided, because they can sell them to more people and reap greater rewards more quickly. in a competitive market, inventions are quickly imitated, so a small inventor’s investment often fails to pay off.
- economic growth is increasingly driven by big ecosystems such as the ones that cluster around Apple’s iPhone or Google’s Android operating system. these ecosystems need to be managed by a core company that has the scale and skills to provide technological leadership
- globalization puts more of a premium on size than ever before. to capture the fruits of innovation it is no longer enough to be a big company by American standards. you need to be able to stand up to emerging-world giants, many of which are backed by something even bigger: the state
- many of the most important challenges for innovators involve vast systems, such as education and health care, or giant problems, such as global warming. to make a serious change to a complex system, you usually have to be big - American firms with 5,000 or more people spend more than twice as much per worker on research and development as those with 100-500
- although big companies often excel at incremental innovation, they are less comfortable with disruptive innovation—the kind that changes the rules of the game
- what matters is not so much whether companies are big or small, but whether they grow. progress tends to come from high-growth companies and growth firms create jobs: in America just 1% of companies generate roughly 40% of new jobs
a billion dollars isn’t cool.
you know what’s cool?
a trillion dollars.
”
trillion-dollar growth trends to 2020
- the next billion consumers
- old infrastructure, new investments
- militarization following industrialization
- growing output of primary inputs
- developing human capital
- keeping the wealthy healthy
- everything the same, but nicer
- prepping for the next big thing
imagine a world in which everything is an app.
…you can both create demand and satisfy it in the same place.
”big hairy audacious goals to stimulate progress
- AIESEC: Engage and develop every young person in the world
- Philip Morris: Slay Goliath and become the front-runner in the tobacco industry, despite the social forces against smoking
- Amazon: Every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds Also: Earth’s most customer centric company
- Boeing: Bet the pot on the B-17, 707 and 747
- Disney: Build Disneyland - and build it to our image, not industry standards. To be the best company in the world for all fields of family entertainment
- Hong Kong Broadband Network: Be the largest IP provider in Hong Kong by 2016
- Ford: “Democratize the automobile”
- Google: Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful
- IBM: Commit to a $5 billion gamble on the 360; meet the emerging need of our customers
- Microsoft: “A computer on every desk and in every home”
- Motorola: Invent a way to sell 100,000 TVs at $179.95; Attain six-sigma quality; Win the Baldridge Award; Launch Iridiums
- Nokia Siemens Networks: Connecting 5 billion people by 2015
- Sony: Change the worldwide image of Japanese products as poor quality; create a pocketable transistor radio
- Summit: “World without Currency Borders” via their game changer M-DAQ pioneering solution for national securities exchanges
- Twitter: To become “the pulse of the planet”
Dan Primack (@danprimack) wrote a quick stat on job creation in the VC industry:
Groupon, LinkedIn and Zynga hired a combined 11,143 new employees between March 2009 and March 2011, based on regulatory filings. During that same period, the overall U.S. economy lost nearly 1.29 million…
in many ways, individual people follow an inverse rule relative to networks of people. Consider the two fundamental laws of networks: both Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law assume that as a network of people grows, the value of the network increases substantially.
but with individuals, the opposite is true: the value of a contributor decreases disproportionately with each additional person contributing to a single project, idea, or innovation.
- Metcalfe’s Law: the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of people in the network
- Reed’s Law: demonstrates that the value for any individual within a network grows exponentially with every new member
while the fundamentals are the same, Apple’s approach to the concept of the cloud is the opposite of their competitors. Apple’s belief is clearly that users will not and should not care how the cloud actually works.
[…]
Apple is going after consumers who have absolutely no idea what the cloud is, and don’t care. Apple is saying they shouldn’t care. it all just works.
google seems to be aiming more for users who understand current computing paradigms and want to transition that knowledge to the future of computing, the cloud. power users, if you will.
…
so why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” Steve Jobs
