The Next Wave of Startups Is Coming Out of Nature

Whether it’s AI or concrete, innovation is coming straight from the natural world.

Image by Harmony Lawrence from Pixabay

“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”

— Peter Thiel, Zero to One

Thiel is saying that Microsoft, Google and Facebook all made something new. They went from nothing to something, from zero to one.

Now that we have an index of the internet, operating systems and social networks, that moment has passed. The next phase of innovations will not come from building on top of what they have built.

It will come from building something new.

Innovation comes from questioning the conventional wisdom of “how things are done”. Contrarian thinking leads to world-changing startups.