Great Founders do something different at the same time: They are obsessed with what will endure 10 or 50 years from now. Kevin Kelly uncovers not just how to be the best, and “the only”, but also – the importance of building something that endures.
Startups and Tech Companies, Are You Being A Good Ancestor For Future Generations?
Take a longer view
- Think less about competitors and more about civilizational scale, infrastructural necessities, and feeding the network
- There are institutional things we can do as a society to help early-stage companies not be so short-sighted
The Underestimated Network Effect Of Giving
The more you give, the more you get
- A universal truth is a network effect of giving
- When you’re successful, a huge degree of it is due to luck
- Gratitude is related to luck and appreciating how lucky you are
Stewards Of The Future
Bigger, more successful networks have network effects that are hard to dislodge
- At some point, the people running these companies have to emerge from their chrysalis of short-term thinking into being more of a steward of the future
What We Saw At Wired, That No One Else Could
The major parents of Wired were Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe
- When you’re the only, it is very hard to get other people on board
- It’s hard to convince employees, investors, or advertisers to join you
What Can You Do Now, That Will Pay Off In 20 Years Or More?
One of the things that we don’t do very well in the U.S. is long-term research.
- We don’t have a very good facility for doing long-range research that might take long to do, something that may take 20 years to pay out.
The Long Arc Of This Force
What the technium wants is very similar to what evolution wants
- It’s headed towards increased complexity, increased diversity, increasing specialization, increasing mutualism, and other things
- One of my goals is to listen to the technology, to listen and learn from watching how people actually use the technology
A Startup’s Chief Advantage Today
True innovation you can only get to if you don’t have the resources.
- You need to amplify, augment, and enhance the fact that you have a lack of resources. That is actually your chief asset. You have to be scrappy and ingenious.
Don’t Be the Best, Be the Only
You want to work on something that nobody has a name for.
- When there’s no name for what you’re doing, that means that there’s no category and you have difficulty explaining to people what it is that you are doing. That means you are on the path to the only.
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