Writing History from the Future Backwards

In a conversation with a couple of entrepreneurs earlier this week we were discussing how radio began as morse code and, similarly, the internet began as text. The point was that the beginning doesn't foretell the mature product. We all agreed online media is still in the embryo stage.

No one knows quite how things will end up...in part because the outcome is determined by the sum of the collective decisions of everyone working in the front lines of online media today. We aren't just passively watching the future unfold, we're molding it on the fly. As I've said before, I think that's an incredibly exciting career opportunity.

It's also a significant business opportunity...thus the presence of the entrepreneurs. While biology can't tell us how the species will evolve, it assures us that changes that occur during the process are likely to be substantial. So if you're trying to design products or businesses that will continue to seem fresh and useful down the road, there's little value in noodling over today's status quo and making logical, linear extrapolations. Doing so only puts you in the thick of the greatest competition: the crowded space in the middle of the bell curve, the apex of conventional wisdom.

In the online medium in particular, where there are fewer physical constraints than for most businesses, vision is key. I'm talking about the ability to see where products, services, and business models should be, and then to take on the challenge of bridging the gap between there and where we are today.

Vision has a long and storied history in the annals of technology. It built companies like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle...then later EBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Google. The vision of the founders of these and similar firms has created trillions of dollars of wealth and utility. None of these companies was conceived as an incremental improvement beyond the status quo.

Even if our online media goal is more modest than to found the next billion-dollar empire, we can profit from the insight to look ahead, not behind. The entrepreneurs I was talking to were conceptualizing business models by looking at Web 2.0 technologies and strategies and imagining how those could be applied to successful business concepts that are now predicated on conventional thinking, reinventing those companies in a next-gen paradigm. They're on the right track.

As an aside, I enjoy meeting internet entrepreneurs. They're a smart, well educated, hardworking, innovative, optimistic (a prerequisite for entrepreneurship), and, yes, visionary breed. They're a stimulating group to rub shoulders with, and they're writing history from the future backwards. We should all give it a try; maybe it's not as hard as it sounds.