3 ms·

There's plenty of me to go around. [Sorry!] Today's billion-dollar markets are not tomorrow's billion-dollar markets. Building a better Digg or Facebook today

There's plenty of me to go around. [Sorry!] Today's billion-dollar markets are not tomorrow's billion-dollar markets. Building a better Digg or Facebook today won't help you kill those companies. First, it would need to be an order of magnitude better to convince anyone to switch. Second, your innovation would need to be hard to duplicate. You might stand a chance if you found some way of positioning a startup for people who don't currently use the existing services, but that's a hard problem. Predicting tomorrow's big markets is a harder problem. The existing big companies go after the big predictable opportunities with vigour and vast resources, leaving us to chase the unpredictable opportunities. Thus, we can't consciously chase the billion-dollar opportunities because we can only guess at their nature.

brentr 19y ago
Why worry about predicting what the next major company will be? You are focusing on the wrong issue. The thing you should be trying to identify is what are the major companies of today not doing quite right or not doing at all. While there are a few examples of billion dollar companies being built upon already existing ideas, the market awards billions of dollars to those who destroy the reliance upon already existing technology. A company that radically changes the way people do things for the better has a much higher probability of attaining billions in market cap than a company that comes along an provides perhaps a better user interface to an already existing service.