Back to our ten small companies. Not only can they build new things themselves, some of those ten companies will build things that become building blocks for new companies. Maybe their innovations will help bring the required team size down from ten to five, freeing up more innovation energy, and so on.It also creates 10x the number of companies... See more

Then, there are macro and tail risks.

The Law of Accelerating Returns states that the rate of change of progress accelerates because humans can use the technology at their disposal to progress faster than previous generations could without the technology.

Here’s the rub: just because it’s likely that things will continue to compound doesn’t mean that there’s an obvious or easy way to play it.

Building blocks let more new companies build faster and leaner.

When it comes to history, we think in straight lines. It’s really hard to grasp how much crazier the future is going to get, because most people extrapolate based on the past growth rate, and even the more optimistic and adventurous ones will extrapolate from the present growth rate.

Zoom out. As Patrick Collison said when describing his admiration for Jeff Bezos to Ezra Klein:There’s something quite deep about the notion of using time horizons as a competitive advantage, in that you’re simply willing to wait longer than other people and you have an organization that is thusly oriented.

What happens to the markets if the US Dollar somehow loses its status as the global reserve currency? The climate change threat isn’t going away any time soon. Will a further run up in the financial markets create such extreme wealth disparity that it causes violent unrest? Will governments tax investment gains, or even stifle innovation, in order... See more

The trajectory of very recent history often tells a distorted story. Making this even harder, in the short-term, assuming an accelerating growth rate might make you look silly or lose money. The progression isn’t smooth. A period of rapid growth might give way to a period of slower growth. Progress happens in S-Curves -- similar to the Gartner Hype... See more