As an entrepreneur, it’s critical for you to realize that technological progress is continuous.
We haven’t reached humanity’s pinnacle of technology.
Every time one form of technology runs out of steam, it is replaced by another, more powerful technology.
In the tech industry, this is referred to as “nested S-curves.”
Here’s what this looks like:
The early computers that used relays (yellow) ran their course… and were replaced by computers using vacuum tubes (blue), then transistors (green), and ultimately what we call Moore’s Law today: computers using integrated circuits (orange).
It’s also important to understand that a decade of progress between 1950 and 1960 is not the same as a decade of progress, say, 50 years later, between 2010 and 2020.
In today’s blog, I’ll discuss the three forces accelerating our world: saved time, demonetization, and capital abundance.
Let’s dive in…
NOTE: Want more insights and guidance on how to navigate this era of exponential change? Join my year-round Mastermind and Executive Program Abundance360.
The first force is “saved time.” Innovation needs time and focus: the ability of a researcher or an entrepreneur to focus their available time on slaying scientific challenges.
How we spend our time has changed a lot in the past few decades. Our ability to get almost any question we have answered instantly on Google is perhaps chief amongst them.
Compare this to the days when you’d need to drive to the library and hope that you could find a published book with the data you need.
Add to this the saved time resulting from instantaneous global communications, the ability to find the exact product you need and order it online—and then have it delivered the very next day.
And with the COVID-19 pandemic, the acceptance of connecting with someone over Zoom, rather than spending an entire day flying from LA to New York for an hour-long meeting.
As this bonanza of extra hours (i.e., saved time) continues to pile up, inventors, entrepreneurs—those proverbial gals and guys in the garage—will get far more time to experiment, fail, pivot, fail again, pivot again, and, eventually, get it right.
Our second force is the demonetization of technology and services. Today, the impact of every dollar spent by an entrepreneur is growing.
Meaning, you can now do much more with an invested dollar today than you could even a decade ago.
Let’s take DNA sequencing as an example, a technology that is demonetizing at a speed 5x faster than Moore’s Law.
In 2001, Craig Venter sequenced his single genome at a cost of $100 million.
Today, you can do it for less than $1,000.
Setting aside the incredible savings in time (9 months to sequence in 2001 vs. hours today), the cost would be 100,000x cheaper.
This means that every dollar in genomics research is going 100,000 times further.
Our third and final force is the abundance of capital. Nothing accelerates technological innovation like cash. Lots of cash.
More cash translates into more people, equipment, experimenting, failing, and eventually creating breakthroughs.
There is now more “capital abundance” than any other time ever.
Companies raised more capital in 2021 (during a pandemic) than at any time in human history.
Perhaps the best example of this is the story of venture capital funding, the traditional source of startup capital that has helped to birth household names from Apple and Google, to Amazon and Uber.
In 2021, U.S. venture capital firms invested an all-time high $330 billion in startups, equivalent to over $900 million every day of the year. This record sum is double the $166.6 billion invested in 2020.
Any way you slice it, this era of unprecedented capital abundance is massively accelerating innovation and funding crazy ideas and Moonshots.
If you’re an entrepreneur, this is a truly exciting time.
How will you take advantage of this accelerating technological progress?
What business will you create that might not have been possible before?
Tweet at me @peterdiamandis.
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