Yes and no. If I wanted to start a social network today, it would not be sufficient to just clone Facebook because the space is already so saturated (it's zero-

Yes and no. If I wanted to start a social network today, it would not be sufficient to just clone Facebook because the space is already so saturated (it's zero-sum). I would have to have something very novel. If, however, I wanted to start a social network back in the early 2000s, I think it would have been sufficient to clone Facebook because the space was not yet saturated. This is not to say that it would have worked out, of course. Most likely I would have been crushed by Zuckerberg. When a new technology emerges, there will be a lot of "obvious" ideas that are ready to be "plucked", but as that technology matures, these obvious ideas become saturated, effectively turning the space into a zero-sum game. For example, in the early days of the app store / mobile revolution, I think there were a lot of reasonably straight-forward ideas out there ready to be executed on, e.g. Uber. I'm not saying that Uber was necessarily obvious to everyone, but I don't think that the idea of summoning a taxi from your phone would have been met with comments like "that's crazy, nobody would ever want that." However, if you wanted to come up with a startup around mobile today, you'd be better be very novel because pretty much everything obvious is already taken. Looking at trends today like autonomous cars, I think there are plenty of reasonably obvious ideas that we all sort of expect will be part of the first generation of applications (shipping, robo-taxies, last-mile delivery). That's not to say that they're easy to implement or by any means are guaranteed to succeed, but I don't think that they'll necessarily be super controversial.