(Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. A longer version of this story originally appeared on his blog.)
As we wrap up 2010, things might seem bleak. The common wisdom says that the chickens have all come home to roost from a disastrous series of economic decisions including outsourcing the manufacture of America’s physical goods. The pundits say the American dream is dead and this next decade will see the further decline and fall of the West and in particular of the United States.
Personally, I think there’s a chance that the common wisdom is very, very wrong – and that the second decade of the 21st century may turn out to be the West’s – and in particular the United States’ – finest hour.
I believe that we will look back at this decade as the beginning of an economic revolution as important as the scientific revolution in the 16th century and the industrial revolution in the 18th century. We’re standing at the beginning of the entrepreneurial revolution.
This doesn’t mean just more technology stuff, though we’ll get that. This is a revolution that will permanently reshape business as we know it and, more importantly, change the quality of life across the entire planet for all who come after us.
You see, it’s only in the last few years that we’ve come to appreciate that past startups were constrained by:
- long technology development cycles (how long it takes from idea to product),
- the high cost of getting to first customers (how many dollars to build the product),
- the structure of the venture capital industry (a limited number of VC firms each needing to invest millions per startups),
- the expertise about how to build startups (clustered in specific regions like Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, etc.),
- the failure rate of new ventures (startups had no formal rules and were a hit or miss proposition),
- the slow adoption rate of new technologies by the government and large companies.
What’s happening now is something more profound than a change in technology. What’s happening is that all the things that have been limits to startups and innovation are being removed. At once. Starting now.
Compressing the Product Development Cycle
In the past, the time to build a first product release was measured in months or even years as startups executed the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. This meant building every possible feature the founding team envisioned into a monolithic “release” of the product.
Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features. The founders were simply wrong about their assumptions about customer needs. The effort that went into making all those unused features was wasted.
Today startups have begun to build products differently. Instead of building the maximum number of features, they look to deliver a minimum feature set in the shortest period of time. This lets them deliver a first version of the product to customers in a fraction on the time.
For products that are simply “bits” delivered over the web, a first product can be shipped in weeks rather than years.
Startups Built For Thousands Rather than Millions of Dollars
Startups traditionally required millions of dollars of funding just to get their first product to customers. A company developing software would have to buy computers and license software from other companies and hire the staff to run and maintain it. A hardware startup had to spend money building prototypes and equipping a factory to manufacture the product.
Today, open source software has slashed the cost of software development from millions of dollars to thousands. For consumer hardware, no startup has to build their own factory as offshore manufacturers absorb the costs.
The cost of getting the first product out the door for an Internet commerce startup has dropped by a factor of a ten or more in the last decade.
The New Structure of the Venture Capital industry
The plummeting cost of getting a first product to market (particularly for Internet startups) has shaken up the venture capital industry. Venture capital used to be a tight club clustered around formal firms located in Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York. While those firms are still there (and getting larger), the pool of money that invests risk capital in startups has expanded, and a new class of investors has emerged.
New groups of VC’s, super angels, smaller than the traditional multi-hundred million dollar VC fund, can make small investments necessary to get a consumer internet startup launched. These angels make lots of early bets and double-down when early results appear. (And the results do appear years earlier then in a traditional startup.)
In addition to super angels, incubators like Y Combinator, TechStars and the 100+ plus others worldwide like them have begun to formalize seed-investing. They pay expenses in a formal 3-month program while a startup builds something impressive enough to raise money on a larger scale.
Finally, venture capital and angel investing is no longer a U.S. or Euro-centric phenomenon. Risk capital has emerged in China, India and other countries where risk taking, innovation and liquidity is encouraged, on a scale previously only seen in the U.S.
The emergence of incubators and super angels has dramatically expanded the sources of seed capital. The globalization of entrepreneurship means the worldwide pool of potential startups has increased at least ten fold since the turn of this century.
Entrepreneurship as Its Own Management Science
Over the last ten years, entrepreneurs began to understand that startups were not simply smaller versions of large companies. While companies execute business models, startups search for a business model. (Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.)
Instead of adopting the management techniques of large companies, which too often stifle innovation in a young start up, entrepreneurs began to develop their own management tools. U
sing the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack, entrepreneurs first map their assumptions (their business model) and then test these hypotheses with customers outside in the field (customer development) and use an iterative and incremental development methodology (agile development) to build the product.
When founders discover their assumptions are wrong, as they inevitably will, the result isn’t a crisis, it’s a learning event called a pivot — and an opportunity to change the business model.
The result: Startups now have tools that speed up the search for customers, reduce time to market and slash the cost of development.
Consumer Internet Driving Innovation
Today, consumers – specifically consumer Internet companies – drive innovation. When the product and channel are bits, adoption by 10’s and 100’s of millions of users can happen in years versus decades.
The barriers to entrepreneurship are not just being removed, they’re being replaced by innovations that are speeding up each step, some by a factor of ten.
And while innovation is moving at Internet speed, this won’t be limited to just internet commerce startups. It will spread to the enterprise and ultimately every other business segment.
The economic downturn in the United States has had an unexpected consequence for startups – it has created more of them. Young and old, innovators who are unemployed or underemployed now face less risk in starting a company. They have a lot less to lose and a lot more to gain.
If we are at the cusp of a revolution as important as the scientific and industrial revolutions what does it mean? Revolutions are not obvious when they happen.
Yet it’s possible that we’ll look back to this decade as the beginning of our own revolution. We may remember this as the time when scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs were integrated into the fabric of society faster than they had ever been before. When the speed of how businesses operated changed forever. As the time when we reinvented the American economy and our Gross Domestic Product began to take off and the U.S. and the world reached a level of wealth never seen before.
It may be the dawn of a new era for a new American economy built on entrepreneurship and innovation – one that our children will look back on and marvel that when it was the darkest, we saw the stars.
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Rick Thompson is hoping that lightning strikes another time. Thompson was the chairman and co-founder of Playdom, the social game company that Disney bought last year for as much as $763 million. Now he has started a new game company, Wild Needle, focused on social games with a location twist.
“Wild Needle represents a shift in the way smart money is thinking of social games,” Thompson said in an interview.
It used to be smart to invest in a game company making social games for Facebook. But Thompson is putting money on the idea that mobile is becoming a larger opportunity. His six-person company will focus on making games for the iPhone and then expand to other mobile platforms. Japan’s DeNA validated this “mobile first” strategy when it bought iPhone game publisher Ngmoco earlier this year for $403 million.
Thompson said he isn’t looking for a similar transaction anytime soon. But because of Zynga’s dominance and Facebook’s crackdown on viral distribution, he doubts that small startups can make an impact on Facebook.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Wild Needle has raised $2.5 million in funding from Thompson and Shasta Ventures. Thompson said that he didn’t need the money to start the company, but he did want access to Shasta’s managing director, Robert Coneybeer, who is joining Wild Needle’s board. Wild Needle’s other top executives include Heidi Carson (vice president of product), Chris Kirmse (vice president of engineering), and Minglei Xu (software architect). Thompson also was founding chairman of online ad networks Flycast and Adify. Kirmse is a veteran game developer who worked at Xfire and was the co-creator of Meridian 59, the world’s first 3D massively multiplayer online game.
Thompson said that there is enormous untapped potential in mobile games that use a device’s location awareness and its always-on connectivity to a social network. Mobile games have lower distribution costs and potentially new kinds of game play around location awareness. Smartphones are also likely to be ubiquitous.
“Things go in cycles,” Thompson said. “Facebook is very challenging for startups now because of high-distribution costs and lack of virality. He said he has investments in a couple of Facebook game companies, one of which is Funzio.
Thompson said Wild Needle is aggressively hiring now. Dan Yue, co-founder of Playdom, and John Pleasants, who was CEO of Playdom, remain at Disney. Thompson said the company’s first game will be targeted at women and feature cool game play. He said he doesn’t think he has direct rivals, but other location-based game companies include Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah.
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Source:http://removeripoffreports.net/
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