What Future Do You Believe In?

I had a conversation with a friend who is a founder of an autonomous vehicle software company about where the future of startups/emerging companies are within his space. We really started to get somewhere when he asked me “well, what kind of future do you believe in?”

It’s an obvious framework in theory, but that single question is so far reaching that it helps tease out a lot.

For autonomous vehicles I start to think about the ownership model being completely upended which in turn trickles up (?) to the manufacturers due to the needs and desires of shared car service providers. This includes things like updatable/modular vehicles that last longer, require very little maintenance, and OEMs that are able to iterate on their product (in this case, the vehicle) quickly without the same infrastructure costs. This is just the beginning of the massive list of opportunities and frankly, my friend helped spur many of those initial thoughts.

In this conversation as we talked and I subsequently learned which future that I believe in related to autonomous vehicles, I realized that this is the question I should directly ask about every emerging industry that I look at within Frontier Tech. It helps build more than just a thesis around a particular segment of a market. It forces you to think through which ancillary parts are affected, where opportunities may lie, and what parts you still haven’t fully thought through.

This originally appeared as a Note on notes.michaeldempsey.me