There are some wild ideas these days. But will they seem wild in 5-10 years?
It’s sort of weird how we look back and hear about an idea or business from a bygone era and think to ourselves: “Man, that’s such a simple idea. Kudos to this guy/gal for thinking of that and executing it, but anyone could have figured that out.”
In reality, at the time, a lot of these simple ideas were unintuitive.
Take CD Baby, Derek Sivers’ business that he sold for around $20-30m. The idea was to bring independent CD and DVD distribution online. We look back and think: “Man, that’s extremely obvious. Obviously, music streaming and online consumption of music content was going to be the future.”
In reality, in 1998, when CD Baby was founded, the internet was not nearly as popular as it is today. Households across the world had to deal with dial-up internet, which meant speeds of like .5 mbps. To download a song (let alone upload a song) to the internet felt… wrong, against the rules, impossible.
I remember in 2005-ish timeframe when iTunes finally started to catch fire and become the primary drive-up window with which millions of people globally got served music without entering a record store. Even then, the distribution models of today seemed insane. Steve Jobs famously said “the subscription model of buying music is bankrupt.” 20 years later and Spotify is the way.
So yeah, in 1998, CD distribution over the internet was super non-obvious.
That begs the question: what’s happening today that in 10 years will seem extremely obvious?
Or asked another way: “What’s being created today, that will pave the way for an awesome future?”
CD Baby created a path for the affordable, online, at-scale independent music distribution model that we all enjoy today.
Here are a few half-baked ideas that might seem obvious in 10 years. Feel free to steal them:
Specialized “robots”... We currently have dishwashers, washers and dryers, and some of us have robot vacuum cleaners. What’s a specialized robot that could become ubiquitous in 10-years?
Software as a Public Service… Sam Altman said something that people called delusional, but I think has legs: “I wonder if there’s a future where everyone gets a slice of the compute of GPT-7.” Why don’t local governments pay for software and distribute it to the citizens of their municipalities? How sweet would it be to have your tax dollars go toward a town-wide Uber subscription so that you didn’t have to pay for every ride you took, it would just come out of your tax dollars as a % of your income?
Personalized content output (for business)… Every executive, employee, manager, etc prefers to consume content in different formats. Employees might like TikTok, managers might like emails, executives might like Podcasts. Whatever the format, the output should be able to be altered depending on the preferences of the end-user. This will be an “obvious idea” in 10 years. Count on it.
Some tools are already trying their hand at this, like Speechify, which turns articles and blog posts into audio, in any voice that you want. That might be one of the tools that people say “The guy who made that really paved the way for how we currently consume books, linkedin, tweets, etc.”
So now the trick is to figure out what the future will look like and how to be the barnacle on the whale of history.
What are you working on today that you feel will be relevant in 10 years?
Share this post