"Spaceships plow the expanses of the universe" - by tkdrobert
I am regularly asked: “You write about startups, but it’s too late to repeat them, but what needs to be launched now, where is the new Facebook?” If I knew the exact answer, I would not tell anyone, but I did it myself, but the direction of the search is quite transparent, you can talk about it openly.
Everything has already been invented before us
All hyper-successful startups are based on very simple ideas. Google has grown due to the fact that links are taken into account in ranking. Booking.com shows all the hotels in the world in a single interface. Tinder allows you to propose an acquaintance with one swipe. Uber is a taxi order in a mobile application. Now these companies employ tens of thousands of employees, they complicate the product every day and add new services, but then, at the start, everything was very simple.
There are few possible brilliant ideas. There are fewer than 100 really big markets in the world. There are 40 basic techniques in TRIZ, they are poorly transferred to virtual services, but we probably have about the same number of them. And let's lay down, say, 5 ways to apply each technique to a particular industry.
Let's try the "artificial limit" method on social networks: number of friends - Path - failure, content size - Twitter - success, content lifetime - Snapchat - success, registration - Facebook - success, amount of content - I don't know an example. What else can be limited? If nothing, then just 5 and it turned out.
100 x 40 x 5 = 20 thousand big ideas could possibly exist. And that's counting even the most ridiculous combinations. There are significantly more projects in the world every year, so that all the opportunities have time to get over more than once.
Every good idea has already been tried, it either took off (and it’s too late to repeat), or it didn’t take off (and it won’t take off with us, we are no better than tens or hundreds of predecessors) - there will be no more startups, we disperse.
Actually, of course not.
The trick is that the world is changing. Something that didn't make sense to try 20 years ago might have failed 10 years ago and has the potential to be super successful now. Future giants try something that was not necessary or impossible before, and manage to be one of the first to launch when it makes sense. The main technological change of the last 30 years - cheaper communications - has made regular interaction between cities and continents economically possible. The result is Facebook, Amazon, Booking.com. For 10 years, "everyone" has a smartphone in his pocket - Uber, Instagram, neobanks have grown on this.
On the Nokia 3310 or even the Samsung S55, the taxi call client application was completely pointless. Probably, someone tried this business anyway, but they didn’t have a chance. On June 29, 2007, the first iPhone appeared and the world changed. Uber was founded in March 2009 - also not the first of its kind, but one of the first, the window of opportunity was opened, no one had taken it yet, they had time - and whatever the spiteful critics say, the company is now worth 51 billion dollars.
The same story can be repeated with other actors. Before the mass spread of the Web, it was impossible to trade over the Internet. As soon as it became popular, a niche for online stores arose. Bezos was not the very first in it, but he was one of the first and, apparently, the most successful - and then there was Amazon.
The world keeps changing
Communication is perfect now. 5G is a tactic, not a strategy, the change is weak, new businesses around the technology will emerge, but the new Google will not. A smartphone is already in every solvent pocket. These waves have fizzled out, but the history of mankind has not ended.
What is there now or will appear in the near future that was not there ten years ago? There are probably many such things, our planet is damn diverse. Someone will immediately remember about new global warming records and population growth (hello, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods), someone about CRISPR (wish unicorns started to appear here too), but in the IT field, the leader seems to be obvious.
In the 2019s, artificial intelligence became a reality. Now, in 20, a computer solves routine tasks better and cheaper than people — at least it recognizes faces, even plays Go, even predicts the emotions of customers. And the work of most people is routine, very few people in the office or at the factory are engaged in real creativity, more and more according to strict instructions. This means that almost everyone can already be replaced by artificial intelligence, and in XNUMX years “can” will turn into “done”. And some specific company, product or startup will “make” it.
And there will be a lot of money
Look . 4.5 million drivers, 3.5 million sales assistants, cashiers, we consider the average salary of 30 thousand dollars a year - there are already markets for 100 billion each in the USA alone. For comparison, Facebook's global revenue for 2018 was $56 billion.
I'm not the only one who knows how to google the most popular profession - only the laziest large corporation is not in the race for self-driving cars. Stores without sellers are also a popular topic, Amazon Go is just one example of how the giants are looking at it. But let's dig a little deeper. In the US, 1 million people sit at the reception. 400 thousand work as administrators in restaurants, and two and a half million work as waiters there (fast food workers are not included here, they are a separate line). And more, more, more... Mass and not very mass professions are waiting for robotization and in most cases no one is in a hurry to help them.
The boundary of "interesting" mass character is easy to calculate. To build a unicorn, you need a profit of 50 million dollars. The revenue, let's say, will be 100 million. To pay 100 million, the startup's clients will save half a billion in staff layoffs - that's about 20 people with a modest American salary. This means that there should be 50 thousand of them on the market in total - not the entire industry will be rebuilt in a reasonable time.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of such specialties and specializations. Of course, in each case there are reasons and explanations why artificial intelligence is not yet possible here, but tomorrow Moore's law will cancel this reason. Or maybe it happened yesterday. The first one to try in time will build a new great company, and there will be dozens of them, like professions. There is nothing more boring than writing a robot merchandiser, but in IT now there is nothing more cost-effective - except perhaps a robot watchman.
Over the past 15 years, we have become accustomed to the emergence of new giant marketplaces, the effect of good communication has reached a variety of industries. Soon, new giant automation and robotics will begin to appear regularly in the news, the time for the introduction of AI is approaching. He must destroy every boring profession. And while the majority will watch history, the minority will create it.
Source: habr.com