What’s the next “Big Thing” going to be?
It’s the dream of every startup founder to be the one who builds the next “Google” or the next “Facebook” of their generation. But how do we work on bringing that great idea to market?
Should we work in a garage in stealth mode as we construct the next Amazon, like it’s mythologized in the media. Unfortunately, it seems that the garage startup days are long over (there’s a good article about that here: ”After the end of the startup era” ) and we need to find our new unique way to achieve success in this post high-tech world.
The tech world is more distributed than ever before
Early IT companies were founded in the US, but things have rapidly changed since then. In 2018, there were 1,854 startups founded by 2,193 different founders (based on crunchbase) and the numbers show that more than 60% of these startups are located outside of North America. And these are only the public numbers!
US infrastructure is really great for founding businesses, but more and more companies are distributing themselves to other parts of the world; there’s a huge amount of people working on various innovations.
But do these other parts of the world have the same startup infrastructure that the US does? Is the distribution of ideas fast enough in others part of the world? This exchange of ideas is the critical factor for each innovation.
The new world powered by self-learning algorithms requires a group of founders with different competences; you need to collect enough data, train a neural network, and eventually promote your product in the crowded market. These particular tasks are hard to solve as a “solopreneur”, but that’s where the team becomes the critical component here.
There are a lot of great places on the web these days to find interviews with the top entrepreneurs who have achieved success. I, personally, am a big fan of Mixergy podcasts, where it’s easy to find any and all types of entrepreneurs.
There is, however, a lack of discussion around the people who I call “innovations hackers”. It’s not just the startup founders who should get the spotlight. Focus should be put on the team members as well, the ones who are getting the truly important things done in the background. Whether you’re a technical expert who’s developing a new algorithm or you’re a lawyer who’s working on making crypto legal, both are important in moving the world to the new era.
Building community
GeekForge was created to fill this very gap. We are a passionate community of innovation hackers who are journeying onwards toward the path to singularity, and we want to create a better place to share and exchange ideas along the way.
If this letter resonates with your goals, please feel free to join our close-knit community and share your story. A good first step would be to email me at ks.shilov@gmail.com.
