Thinking further out!
by Pratik Bajaj
Have you ever heard about the recency bias? Let me explain. It’s the opposite of thinking further out. Now, what’s that you ask? Lemme give you few examples. When everyone was busy becoming a dot-com, google solved the problem of search from amongst that plethora of dot coms, when everyone wanted to be a search engine, Facebook came as a medium to network. When everyone was busy building another social media app, Netflix and Uber were the clear outperformers. And then everyone wanted to be a ride-hailing giant, but Paytm & stripe made breakthroughs in the fintech space. So everyone wanted to be a payment app but then we got Byjus and now everyone seems to be fascinated with edtech. And between all these, we also got Tesla, Youtube, Whatsapp and Airbnb. I’m sure I’m missing out on very deserving names but you get an idea.
You will hear a lot of start-up enthusiasts say “Ideas are nothing, execution is everything.” But for any business to incept, for it to work, it requires an idea to start with. An idea that solves a problem that is all- Popular, Growing, Urgent, Expensive, Mandatory & Frequent. Let’s squeeze some more examples here. Popular as in how Uber solved the common problem of ride-hailing, growing as in how Tesla offered a sustainable alternative to combustion engines, Urgent as in how Unacademy made quality education accessible to all, Frequent as in Swiggy solving food delivery hassle, Expensive as in how Zerodha democratized stock trading and Mandatory as in Paytm revolutionizing payments & acceptances hurdles.
It’s imperative to understand here that all those names, all those start-ups that we are freely quoting here were all solving existing problems with ahead-of-the-time solutions. Big breakthrough ideas often sound nuts the first time you hear them. When Brian Chesky told the world about his idea of Airbnb, it was rebuked by everyone including the third founder. At face value, letting a stranger into your house sounded like a preposterous idea. But the world of start-ups has proven time and again, that what sounds like a crazy idea may actually be the next big thing. This is where the concept of thinking further out comes into play. Entrepreneurs need to escape the velocity of mundane, what’s already there and blooming ought to be a competitive space that is incredibly difficult to get into. Billion-dollar ideas lie in the gaps of today’s problem solved by future tech. The problem will age but the solution shouldn’t. Google is doing everything today. You know why? Because it can. They have spent around $4Bn on autonomous driving while other self-driving companies developed the technology for just a few million. But does Google care? Absolutely no, they are thinking further out. And, and they aren’t doing that now. They have the resources today to burn for research and development because they thought further out, back in 1998. We need future solutions to today’s problem.
Carving a niche derivative in a competitive space works well too. I often joke- History doesn’t repeat itself but it sure rhymes. We have examples of windows explorer putting Netscape navigator out of business. We got a Facebook in the world of myspace, we also got a Twitter in the world of Facebook. Spotify came and conquered the music streaming space because youtube refused to change its stance on background playing. They all thought further out, saw a genuine need, and carved a niche in a competitive market.
Artificial intelligence, machine learning and the Internet of Things are really big these days. We have smartphones, smart TVs, smart homes, smart cars, basically smart everything. But the ones that will emerge as leaders in these spaces will be those who will think further out and solve today’s problems with tomorrow’s applicability. So now when you hear Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk talking about Mars as a habitat, you know what they are doing, preparing a future solution to today’s problem of overpopulation and inhabitability.
What’s your idea? Is it future-proof?
