Tuesday, October 28, 2014

The best time to start up is now!

Technology is growing faster today than ever in history.  The major difference from the past technological revolutions is the motivation behind the drive.  For most of the history, major leaps in technology were a result of wars (cold or hot).  World War 2 saw the advent of many groundbreaking techs, including but not limited to the nuclear tech and Computing (aka  Alan Turing's contribution).

Thankfully, not any more.  The current fast pace is a result of a growing class of entrepreneurs interested in solving problems.  'Solve a problem first and think of profiting from it later', is a growing mindset.  It started with Google, whose 'Don't be Evil' mantra has stood the test of time, and even allayed the fears of the greedy Wall Street guys, whose long term vision doesn't even stretch past their own shadows (as stated in the movie Jobs) and corroborated in the movie The Wolf of the Wall Street.

Some people feel they have missed the boat.  I have heard many say: 'We have missed the opportunity in technology'.  What they refer to is their opinion of the saturation in new ideas.  They feel they should have thought of WhatsApp or Facebook or LinkedIn earlier.  Now there is nothing new to do.  I feel the exact opposite.  Now is the best time to start and pivot, than ever before.  The world is realizing  that Governments have no business in business.  The individual visionaries will carry the world on their shoulders.  Elon Musk has pretty much shut up all the naysayers.  The world was against him when he founded SpaceX and Tesla.  Now, the world is with him.  Larry Page famously noted that he would rather leave all his wealth to Elon Musk than donate it to a charity.  Now is the time you grab the wind and pull the strings.  Let me give you some examples.

Google started because Larry Page and Sergey Brin rejected the offer Yahoo made.  They then took the idea of Web Search, which was thought as a pretty boring idea in the late 90s, and turned it around, so much so that they now match Microsoft in market cap.

SpaceX failed to launch its first 4 rockets successfully.  The Falcon 5 was the first one to succeed, but after that SpaceX saw 0 failures.  It now has $2.8 billion in contracts from NASA, and it is single-handedly removing US's dependence from Russia.

Tesla Motors had a fleet of defective cars in their workshop in 2008.  The concept of Electric Cars was thought of as long dead.  Oil corporations had muzzled the electric car companies and Tesla was thought to be the next one to die.  But now we know what Tesla Motors has achieved.

Messaging was thought of as a dead game.  Gtalk, Facebook Messenger etc. had the market share and there didn't seem much to innovate.  Then came WhatsApp, a simple, no gimmick chat application that only worked on cell phones.  It did not sell ads.  It exploded and was bought by Facebook for a whopping $19 billion. Even after this success, there was SnapChat.

In essence, there is no market that's saturated, and every market is ripe for disruption, even the Search market.  Google is the leader, but disruption might just be around the corner.  Go start and pivot!


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