This is a tautological claim. Of course with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the biggest successes were those significantly changed the world... No way!? That's why they're successes! Lots, and lots of examples of people who similarly dreamed of changing the world with BIG ideas that completely failed. The bigger idea, the lower your probability of success, but with a larger potential return (both personal wealth and impact). I've never seen any data to support that your risk adjusted return on big ideas is better than for smaller ideas.<p>Massive vividness bias here.
I find that this article is representative of much of the content of HN these days: provocative assertions made by relative nobodies with little supporting evidence save anecdote, but made with the full voice of authority. Found a middling startup or two, and you're suddenly an expert. Call me old fashioned, but I like to get my blanket generalizations only from those significantly richer, more powerful, happier, or more successful than I am.
Just to derail a bit...<p>I've always disagreed with Jobs over the filesystem thing. There's just a minimum level of knowledge a computer user needs to use the damn thing, and file systems are really fundamental to that. I've never seen an abstraction that worked well enough to replace the file system as we know it, so abstractions stay welded to particular apps. Then you have a bunch of domain specific abstractions replacing a common system that was never broken.<p>I've worked some service jobs, at a FedEx computer center and a University computer lab. I've seen several poor souls who couldn't for the life of them use a pointing device OR keyboard. Far more common is people who can't grasp the idea of usernames and passwords; and I mean really can't understand the difference.<p>"Why does it have to be so hard?" is the question. Not for hard concepts, but for every concept. People offer to pay me to write their email and school papers, so they don't have to fight with Word and the whole save/load idea (not to mention glacial slow typing). Maybe this person could be served by some ultra-simple software, negating the need for new skills. I really feel this is a disservice to them. In the case of a student, this all but guarantees they are dead in the water career wise, even if they somehow eek through school.<p>I think people should just learn about files, they are fundamental to computer use. In the far future, when we have Star Trek style voice driven computers, most people will utterly fail to use them. "Computer, email? No I mean the one I sent. Why can't you just find it?!? There was a picture". Anyone who thinks natural language is clear and intuitive should be sentenced to two years labor in a public computer lab or call center.
> I think the minimum viable product has made us so effective at thinking short term that we spend less time thinking long term.<p>There is such a thing as a product or idea to be presented "before it's time". I wonder if there's an opposite of an MVP like a "Maximum Viable Product" - The most advanced product the market is likely to support at the moment.
If you live in the future, there is no poverty<p>If you live in the future, there are no diseases<p>If you live in the future, you can live for 200+ years<p>If you live in the future, we stopped using fossil fuels<p>If you live in the future, computers don't track us<p>If you live in the future, facebook doesn't exist<p>so lets get back to work..
What kind of founder doesn't think this? "In the future everyone will be using this ____ that I'm making" - whether it's a virtual pet app or a new distribution of ubuntu. The problem is that <i>just thinking this is the case</i> is so far from meaning that it has any chance of coming true that the thought hardly helps anything.<p>I don't disagree with the thought, I just don't think it really carries any particular meaning.
There is what the future could be, what tomorrow will be, and what today is.<p>Sometimes building a product is about building the future, but not every product is about that. If you don't have the resources to see it through to the future where what you envision is the default, you will fail.<p>Think about Netflix. Streaming video on the internet is a 20 year old idea right? They had to start with delivering dvd's in the mail, which is kind of an analog version of streaming in some ways right? Similar idea, but also fundamentally different delivery mechanism. Even if their goal was streaming movies directly to houses, that's not what they built first.<p>If you can see the problems of today, a way to fix it tomorrow, and maybe what that evolves into in 5, 10, 20 years... awesome. But if you just see a good idea that will take 5, 10, 20 years to be viable... run away unless you have billions of dollars you want to light on fire(like Microsoft on tablets, web tv, home automation, etc...)
The best founders are lucky.<p>Right place. Right time. Right society.<p>A clusterfuck of luck if you will.<p>That's the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from such small data sets that include within them insane variance, complex systems, extreme path dependence, and extremely disparate successful strategies (sometimes VC shoot to the moon works, sometimes bootstrapping, sometimes established spin outs, sometimes tech, sometimes marketing, sometimes government contracting).<p>There is no best founders are X. Just unique situations accidently exploited by founders who happily find themselves embedded directly within them. Founders are by far the least important factor in the causal chain that ends up with their eventual success, or failure.
I would say 70% of my ideas are futuristic, which is why I'm working on the other 30%<p>That 70% depends on technologies that plain don't exist yet, or are highly experimental at best since some depended on funding that isn't there anymore so the underlying tech needed to move to the next stage is still nowhere to be seen.<p>Case in point: without CAD we wouldn't have stealth planes. The theory existed on paper and attempts at stealth go all the way back to WWII, but it wasn't workable until we had the computer power to crunch the numbers.
OK, that's an interesting piece. I'll take a stab at a "If you live in the future ..." statement that goes along with what we're doing at Fogbeam.<p><i>If you live in the future, computers will be more intelligent and will make it far easier and faster to find exactly the information you are looking for, will make useful predictions to guide your decision making, and will enable new management structures for organizations</i>.
I don't think that taking jobs as a reference for thinking ahead of time is specially good; In this particular video, he is presenting, to the general public, the 'file system' as a general software application that can be replaced by another one. This is totally and entirely misleading: without file system I doubt he can maintain any unified and persistent local data storage on a computer.<p>I understand that, ultimately, he is talking about the file explorer software application, but getting layman to confuse the two is almost a sin, as those users are potentially novice expert in the making (plus the fact that he is repeatedly say 'app', 'app', 'app', as if this would make the software application of the mac environment more of a software than on other platform ....).<p>If you really want to put a video of future thinking in the computing world, ... well welcome to 1968: <a href="http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html" rel="nofollow">http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html</a>
I hope he's right, I certainly think about my company that way. But it's still a bold statement with no evidence given. Yes those founders <i>might</i> have said those things. Did they?
<i>We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.</i><p>Ha ha. I'm part of the problem.<p>But yeah, I think it's probably a good idea to have a vision of the future and strive to work towards building that, if you're lucky enough to be in a position to do anything about it, and hopefully your vision of a glorious posthuman utopia isn't my vision of a dehumanizing nightmare.
Being able to envision the future is only a small part of being able to see the big picture, being able to see the big picture is an even smaller part of being a successful founder. But yes, I think it is a prerequisite to be a great founder.
...Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”....
- From the Steve Jobs biography
I would classify myself as a futurist, but we have a flaw...one that tends to lead to our demise:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara</a>
If you live in the future, there will be a thread on HN of "if you live in the future" quotes.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5801697" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5801697</a><p>Enjoy !
Telepathic and empathic abilities will emerge evolutionarily in the hominids through the mixed organization of their organisms and the long-term effects of information on the brain.<p>" If, during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organization, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometric powers of increase of each species, at some age, season or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite variety in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being’s own welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.
In 5 years, if progress continues (and, in all things human, it might not):<p>1. The top software companies will be running open allocation. It won't get into the mainstream by then, and maybe not ever, because it's not practical for all industries. (You can't run OA easily in finance for regulatory reasons.) However, you'll have to pay hedge-fund money to recruit talented people into a closed-allocation company.<p>2. Location will be much less relevant than it is now. Right now, "Number 6 startup scene" means none at all. That's changing.<p>3. Google will either have been thoroughly destroyed (on a cultural front) by stack ranking, or have reinvented itself utterly in a form more like its pre-apocalyptic state.<p>Anyone who can turn these into startups, share your thoughts.