The best founders are futurists
josephwalla.com
The best founders are futurists
1–10 of 81 posts
Re: The best founders are futurists
#2The author makes up several quotes prepended with "might have said" to justify a large part of this argument. What a load of crap
Re: The best founders are futurists
#3> I think the minimum viable product has made us so effective at thinking short term that we spend less time thinking long term.
There is such a thing as a product or idea to be presented "before it's time". I wonder if there's an opposite of an MVP like a "Maximum Viable Product" - The most advanced product the market is likely to support at the moment.
Re: The best founders are futurists
#4> I think the minimum viable product has made us so effective at thinking short term that we spend less time thinking long term. There is such a thing as a product or idea to be presented "before it's time". I wonder if there's an opposite of an MVP like a "Maximum Viable Product" - The most advanced product the market is likely to support at the moment.
Or not that the market is likely to support at the moment, but that is simply possible to build with today's materials and processes. Like the Apple Newton, perhaps.
Re: The best founders are futurists
#5If you want to become a better futurist, there's nothing like lots of practice for improving your calibration. The best way I can think of to get lots of practice at technology forecasting is to sign up for George Mason University's DAGGRE program, which will let you participate in a multi-year prediction tournament focused on science and technology forecasting. Details here: http://is.gd/qHnaOY
Re: The best founders are futurists
#6I hope he's right, I certainly think about my company that way. But it's still a bold statement with no evidence given. Yes those founders might have said those things. Did they?
Re: The best founders are futurists
#7This is a tautological claim. Of course with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the biggest successes were those significantly changed the world... No way!? That's why they're successes! Lots, and lots of examples of people who similarly dreamed of changing the world with BIG ideas that completely failed. The bigger idea, the lower your probability of success, but with a larger potential return (both personal wealth and impact). I've never seen any data to support that your risk adjusted return on big ideas is better than for smaller ideas.
Massive vividness bias here.
Re: The best founders are futurists
#8Telepathic and empathic abilities will emerge evolutionarily in the hominids through the mixed organization of their organisms and the long-term effects of information on the brain.
" If, during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organization, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometric powers of increase of each species, at some age, season or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite variety in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being’s own welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.
Re: The best founders are futurists
#9There is what the future could be, what tomorrow will be, and what today is.
Sometimes building a product is about building the future, but not every product is about that. If you don't have the resources to see it through to the future where what you envision is the default, you will fail.
Think about Netflix. Streaming video on the internet is a 20 year old idea right? They had to start with delivering dvd's in the mail, which is kind of an analog version of streaming in some ways right? Similar idea, but also fundamentally different delivery mechanism. Even if their goal was streaming movies directly to houses, that's not what they built first.
If you can see the problems of today, a way to fix it tomorrow, and maybe what that evolves into in 5, 10, 20 years... awesome. But if you just see a good idea that will take 5, 10, 20 years to be viable... run away unless you have billions of dollars you want to light on fire(like Microsoft on tablets, web tv, home automation, etc...)
Re: The best founders are futurists
#10I hope he's right, I certainly think about my company that way. But it's still a bold statement with no evidence given. Yes those founders might have said those things. Did they?
My gut says that yes, they did. However, they may have also said that the world is shaped like a burrito.
Certain jobs encourage the spouting of all kinds of sweeping statements. The ones that turn out to be true will be remembered, the others forgotten.