Born in the Darkness
There’s this scene in the The Dark Knight Rises where the bad guy Bane is beating Batman up, and Bane says, “Ohh, you think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it,” in his creepy weird voice.
Being born in the darkness has been a key advantage for startups over the past twenty years. When the dot com craze hit in the late nineties, everyone thought, hey, just add Interwebs and we’ll all get rich!
Some people tried to throw technology in as an afterthought, like Pets.com. Others had technology as their core driving force, like Amazon. Only the latter effectively took advantage of the new tech.
When young entrepreneurs heard industries talking about adapting to the modern age by getting a Facebook page, like that was the latest and greatest, they knew these industries hadn’t begun to imagine the automation and convenience that could be achieved with a software-first approach. Internet startups that were born in the darkness had a huge advantage.
You can see the same thing with social. Google Plus was an afterthought. Facebook was born in social.
How can we distinguish between companies adopting the darkness and those born to it? In general we should do the dumbest thing that works. If your company can use less advanced tech with no disadvantage, then it should, and your company doesn’t really need that tech and is not “born in that darkness.”
Take mobile. Mobile isn’t necessary for Yahoo and Google, though it doesn’t hurt. Mobile is a big advantage for Twitter and Facebook. They function better when people can access them all day. And mobile is completely essential for Uber and Waze. No mobile, no Uber or Waze. Uber and Waze were born in mobile.
Right now the cutting edge is mobile, blockchain, AI, and then a few other fields like biotech, self-driving cars, and space.
In particular, AI and blockchain are becoming the new dot-com-craze Interwebs: take any business, add Interwebs, and hey presto you’ve got some magic. We have to think hard about which businesses which rely on AI and blockchain for their pizzazz will actually work out.
Start by asking the question: is this business adding AI or blockchain like icing on the cake? Or is it born to the darkness? And to answer that, ask if the business can run without AI and blockchain.
If your business works just as well as a snazzy website and some logic, you don’t need AI. If you could just use a distributed hash table, you don’t need blockchain.
If your robots won’t walk without AI, or if your social network can’t reward its creators without its altcoin, you really need those technologies. You’re born in that darkness. This doesn’t mean you’ll succeed, but at least you’re not starting off with a bogus idea.
Those are the kind of ideas we need to search for.