Idea machines are not new, but the form in which they appear is changing. For most of the 20th century, the home for idea machines was foundations, first popularized by John D. Rockefeller in the 1910s.
Q: Is it better to target a small market or a large one?
In the clip below, Peter Thiel (billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal and Palantir) describes his framework for evaluating markets:
“It’s always a big mistake going after a giant market on day 1. That’s… Show more
More broadly, what will remain are jobs to be done. Software needs to be stable and predictable and have infrastructure to run on; that is a lot easier to buy from an entity than to manage yourself. Businesses don’t want to be IT departments; they want to actually achieve business results, and any time spent trying to get stuff to work is a waste... See more
The makeup of a successful entrepreneur is a special blend of wanting to make the world better and possessing enough commercial aptitude to figure out a way to do it in a successful and self-sustaining way
On the other end of specificity, idea machines are less broad than paradigm shifts, which are widespread, headless, decentralized shifts in cultural norms and attitudes due to changes in systemic conditions. For example, web3 is a paradigm shift, but it’s too big and distributed to be an idea machine.
Feeling like you’re worth listening to is a byproduct of making hard decisions and teasing out of them cohesive and convincing personal stories that help you make sense of the world.