How to Time Travel

We all know the David and Goliath story, and that’s how I want to frame today’s piece. Imagine the Present being the titan that is, Goliath and the future being the challenger, which is little old David. What can David do to take down Goliath? In other words how can those who have an accurate view of the future, bring it to mass adoption today.

With the help of a few smart people, I’ve come up with three modes of transport into the future: Inflections, Insights and Constants. 

Inflections

Mike Maples, Jr. describes himself as being a birdwatcher but for startups. He is a legendary early-stage startup investor, having made early bets on companies like Twitter, Lyft, and Twitch and is one of the pioneers of seed-stage investing as a category. He wrote the book, Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future, where he discusses what he’s found separates startups and founders that break through and change the world from those that don’t. 

This book was a culmination of Mike’s years reviewing decks from the thousands of startups that would have returned you 100 times your first cheque and trying to draw out a pattern. He uncovered three ways that breakthrough founders think and act differently. One of the ways is through acting on inflections. Inflections are external events that create potential for radical change in how people think, feel and act. An example of an inflection could be the adoption of the Blockchain technology. Because the world saw a purpose in a decentralised-distributed ledger, people also thought of a decentralised currency which gave rise to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. 

Inflections aren’t purely technological, think about COVID-19. Prior to the global outbreak the virus, the idea of virtual GP appointments were largely shunned, because people almost always opted for the in-person experience. In the post-COVID world, people opted for convenience and those who are prone to disease recognised the increased danger to themselves of visiting the GP for an appointment in the first place — the beliefs changed around the idea. The same goes for remote or hybrid work, we’ve moved from a world where you were unanimously expected to be in the office 5 days a week to now a few days or in some cases not at all. I even had friends get married over Zoom. The point is, is that one inflection gives room for a larger ripple effect. Whether its changes in regulation, technology or attitudes — the question to ask is how strong are these changes? This strength serves as the underlying force that can help your idea escape the gravitational pull of the present. Remote doctors appointments wouldn’t have been as accepted a practice in the pre-covid and Instagram wouldn’t be as big as it is without the improvement of smartphone cameras.

Inflections show us how tomorrow is not similar to yesterday. The tricky thing about inflections is that they constantly are all around us, waiting to be noticed. There’s a power in the thing that we use today that has yet to be harnessed. Take the history of the wheel, it was mounted horizontally for 500 years before it was done so vertically. That slight adjustment would disrupt the nature of transportation forever. Acting on inflections allow you to wage asymmetric warfare on present, because you’ve now noticed something that others haven’t — you can work on bringing the future into today. 

Insights

Speaking of wheels, that takes us on to the second way to live in the future — through insights. 

In 1903, Henry Ford registered his own company with $28,000 from investors and a vision: “to build a motor car for the great multitude.” Around that time in the states there were about 140,000 cars on American roads. People were still people were still moving around on horses. But this was becoming increasingly problematic because the population in big cities was growing exponentially. Horses required huge amounts maintenance: money, time, and space to keep them alive, not to mention dealing with the literal horse poo all over the streets. Henry Ford saw a different future and The Ford Model T with a V8 horse powered engine which he had created in 1908 was what he viewed as a step towards it.

The issue Ford had was that manufacturing was far too slow, it was taking 12 hours to produce one vehicle — which meant his vision of the future would never be realised, unless he somehow sped up the manufacturing process — which he did. He chose to implement the moving assembly line for mass production of his car. While Ford did not invent the assembly line concept, he was the first to implement it on a massive scale in car manufacturing. By 1913, Ford was able to fully assemble a new Model T in under two hours and at its peak, Ford’s assembly line was producing one car every 24 seconds. This transformed not just car manufacturing, but the entire landscape of industrial production and consumer culture in the 20th century. By 1921, there were now approximately 9 million cars on American roads and and the Model T held 57% of the global market share. 

There’s a profound misconception about how vision looks and sounds. Although I struggled to find direct accounts, it’s highly likely that Ford’s idea of mass production and adoption of vehicles were rejected. There’s a famous quote of his that may be false but says: “If I had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses.” I imagine people rejected his assembly line implementation for a plethora of reasons. But what made the adoption of the model T almost inevitable was that based on Ford’s knowledge he proposed a radically different future and then worked back from this. Rather than working forward from the present as an extension into the future. Mike Maples puts this another way, saying that when startups are fighting for market share from incumbents they cannot compete on good vs. better, they must compete on good vs. radically different to disorient the incumbent. This is why your ideas about the future are almost meant to sound wrong, because you are proposing a radical deviation from the present and by extension you are provoking a level of polarisation — you’re either with me on this or you’re not, which the average person doesn’t like. And that’s fine, so long as your insight is grounded in a level of domain expertise. 

Paul Graham echoed this in his essay Crazy New Ideas: “When the average person proposes an implausible-sounding idea, its implausibility is evidence of their incompetence. But when a reasonable domain expert does it, the situation is reversed. There’s something like an efficient market here: on average the ideas that seem craziest will, if correct, have the biggest effect. So if you can eliminate the theory that the person proposing an implausible-sounding idea is incompetent, its implausibility switches from evidence that it’s boring to evidence that it’s exciting.”

Vision doesn’t come about by just magically seeing into the future, it arrives through sitting there and getting your hands dirty. This is how you gain a right of passage into the future — you earn the secrets. It doesn’t mean that what you might build at first will be perfect, if the insight is right you can pivot to find PMF eventually and if you have the right insight you have the first mover advantage into the future anyway. Better to have the wrong implementation than the wrong insight because if your insight is wrong, you have the wrong foundation for stepping into the future. The company Okta at first wanted to do help companies solve their cloud systems problems, customers were very meh about their solution — customers said identity management was what they really needed, so they pivoted. Insight was right: Customers struggled to manage their cloud services but the implementation was wrong. If there’s no desperation, either insight is wrong, implementation is wrong or you might need to speak to different customer.

Insights don’t always come around as a perfect science though. Sometimes, when you’ve been doing something so long you can afford to rely a little on intuition because you know what you need right now, so you can do apply some patchwork to make things happen. After tinkering with the web for many years, Marc Andreessen created Netscape, because most existing browsers at the time were for expensive Unix machines and had unfriendly user interfaces. Andreessen wanted to create a browser for more common platforms like PCs and Macs. He did this on a hunch and ended up creating the future of the internet. While I was writing this episode, I realised I ended up doing the same thing at my current startup. I wanted to create indicators for when a customer was potentially unhappy or going to leave, so that we could engage them to increase their happiness with us long before discussions of renewal started. I cobbeled together an excel to track a bunch of data points and push out a happiness score card based on inputs. Two years later I found a startup called, Hook, which had launched around the same time I was doing this that does the exact same thing that I was doing but as a software — and had raised $3.5m at pre-seed stage. Innovation is as scrappy as acting on a hunch sometimes. 

Insights are interesting in the fact that they leverage Inflections, but they’re non-consensus. So, Ford leveraged the inflection of the assembly line being used in production to mass-produce vehicles. The insight is the vessel — So if we go back to our David and Goliath analogy, the sling shot insight, and the rock inflection. 

Constants

So, we come to our final mode of time travel into the future something I like to call: Constants.

One of the most frequent question people poses when thinking about the future is: ‘What’s next?’ What’s next for media, what’s next for technology, what’s next for travel. With the world changing so rapidly, the race to get ahead of the next evolution is always on. But for a man who saw and implemented a radically different future, everyone is asking the wrong question.

In 2012, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, took the stage at the company’s re: Invent developer conference and shared some thoughts on how he thinks about the future and how it informs his innovation investment decisions. Alongside the company’s CTO, Werner Vogels, the duo engaged in a wide-ranging discussion about Amazon’s web service and retail business, as well as Bezos’ views on entrepreneurship and his personal projects, such as space travel. But it was one point from Vogels that prompted the most fascinating response of all. 

Vogels posed the open-ended question to Bezos on how he thinks about innovating with respect to the Web Service business area of Amazon, to which Bezos answered:

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’

And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time … In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection.

It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible. […] When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

By the way, when Jeff mentioned the possibility of customers asking to be charged higher prices — the audience laughed. The audience’s reaction in this instance is profound because it highlights just how absurd it would be that an Amazon customer would ask such a thing; and because it is so absurd they would ask this, it makes sense to double down on its inverse. For Amazon, the inverse would be to continue to invest in: 1) growing their catalogue, 2) making their service cheaper and 3) delivering products faster.

Close

I often feel there’s an overly romanticised view of the present because there is an assumption that the current paradigm is perfect. It’s not. People tend to attack new ideas when they have a vested interest in the old regime. There’s no surprise why some of Nelson Mandela’s harshest critics were International corporations and governments benefiting from apartheid, or why Charles Darwin’s critics were churchmen. So in a weird way, the most drastic ideas will be marmite, many may be hostile and then there’s a subset who will be stans. 

The reality is what Science-Fiction Writer, William Gibson, once said in that: “The future is already here but it’s not evenly distributed.” And the beauty of it is that we don’t need to see everything, just the thing that you are uniquely suited to improve.

What is a current Goliath that you could play David to?