Starting a company is like trying to tell the future and then placing a massive bet on it.
Say, your random idea takes a year or two to build, and is on the market for another couple of years. Wouldn’t it be great to start with something that at least makes sense in five years time?
Predicting the future is hard. Back To The Future didn’t get much right, and just take look at Gizmodo’s collection about what people in 1899 thought the future will be:
Good news is that unless you are really-really trying to form our future, you don’t need to predict very precisely: you only need to bet on a bandwagon.
You probably did well if you started any Internet company in 2000, or did anything for mobile a good five years ago. Nowadays everyone is saying cognition and IOT, and indeed, the new frontiers seem to be exactly there.
Google’s autonomous cars are already on the road, Apple’s Siri is basically an in-car OS on its own right. Uber want to kick out their taxi drivers and go with driverless cars instead. General Motors invested $500 million in Uber-competitor Lyft.
Can you see a pattern here?
Once you have your prediction, just act on it any way you can. Not necessarily open a startup right away I mean: a friend of mine started an IOT blog a couple of years ago, just-for-fun. He wanted to learn about the industry as well as maybe identify a product idea or attract interesting people. A few years later he was famous enough to be invited to speak on conferences, and now?
His one-year-old startup just started to develop an in-car-analytics system together with BMW.
Don’t forget to place your bets today.