🔮 Living in the future
A guest post by Mike Maples, co-founding Partner at Floodgate Fund
Hi,
I am still on holiday in Peru, thinking hard about technology pathways, social structure and development as we walk through the Sacred Valley, the heart of the Inca civilisation.
While away, I asked my long-time EV friend
to mind the shop for a day. Mike is a renowned Silicon Valley investor whose portfolio includes Twitter, Twitch and Lyft. He has a rich history in the tech industry, including a stint at one of my favourite firms ever, Silicon Graphics. He recently published a new book with co-author Peter Ziebelman, Pattern Breakers: Why Some Startups Change the Future [🇺🇸 US edition | 🇬🇧 UK edition].In the book, Mike and Peter look at the common threads among radical, industry-transforming startups that seem to emerge from nowhere and become household names within a decade. In their view, the secret lies in “pattern breaking” — a rebellious streak of thinking and acting commonly observed in founders who create tsunamis of innovation.
Today, we exclusively bring you Chapter 6 of Mike’s book. This chapter looks at how “living in the future” can prime you for pattern breaking. In Mike’s own words:
You need to experience firsthand the new powers that inflections confer on people. By interacting with that thing—by using it, experimenting with it, probing its powers—and by interacting with other people who are also living in the future, you begin cultivating new patterns of behavior. These new patterns […] enable you to see that the way people live at present isn’t compulsory. The world as it exists now—the world that is—represents just one way among many that the world could be.
Mike’s perspective isn’t just for founders — it’s equally valuable for policymakers, executives, fellow investors and anyone who wants to shape our near future through AI and other exponential technologies.
Take a moment to thank Mike by restacking this post on Substack or sharing it with your network.
As always, comments are open for Premium members of Exponential View to discuss.
Over to Mike!
Azeem
Pattern Breakers: Why Some Startups Change the Future
Chapter 6: Living in the Future
was a student at the University of Illinois in the winter of 1992, earning minimum wage as a programmer at the school’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Despite his meager earnings, he found more important riches in the next-generation technology that surrounded him. NCSA was a hub for supercomputing and high-speed networking, bolstered by generous funding from the government’s National Science Foundation. NCSA stood as a crucial node in a network of minds and machines igniting the early wildfire called the internet.Andreessen and his colleague Eric Bina were living at technology’s front lines, tinkering at its boundaries. At the same time, the US government was starting to open the internet for commercial use. Tim Berners-Lee had invented the World Wide Web and recently turned it loose in the public domain.
Marc and Eric were living in the future.
Despite the fact that they had access to technology most could only dream about, the software that could unlock its potential was primitive at best. Seeing firsthand what was lacking, Marc and Eric set out to build the software they thought should exist.
People who ran things in the big institutions of the present could be forgiven for not noticing. They were engrossed in a question that mattered to them far more: Who would build what they called the digital superhighway?
Some thought telecommunications and cable companies would lead due to their widespread physical networks. They would expand their current telephone lines or cables and provide the new “pipes” to meet emerging digital needs. Others believed that tech companies like Microsoft or AOL would be front-runners. Microsoft was building the Microsoft Network (MSN) and echoed AOL’s approach of a “walled garden.” They aimed to create, curate, and control the content flowing through their networks. Their consumer software and PC market dominance cast them as strong contenders.
Some thought that perhaps the government should take it on. After all, DARPA’s vision, funding, and research had already laid the foundational technologies and protocols that would beget the internet. One could draw an analogy to how, in the second half of the twentieth century, the government had successfully laid the concrete interstate highways that changed how Americans lived.
People expected the digital superhighway to be a top-down effort. Few imagined the alternative: a bottom-up approach, born in a different future.
Behind the scenes, several inflections were gathering that weren’t apparent to most of the people living in the present. The first inflection, mentioned above, was the government’s decision in 1991 to open the internet to commercial traffic. The number of access points and the connections among its users were increasing, and the pathways that carried digital traffic were increasing in capacity at an exponential rate. Recently crafted standards marked another inflection. These included the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HyperText Markup Language (HTML).
Nobody imagined that a college kid earning minimum wage in a computer lab would completely change the conversation—by developing the world’s first user-friendly internet browser.
But Marc, Eric, and a few other colleagues did. Because they were living in the future, they were interacting on a daily basis with the new, enabling technologies of the internet and cultivating new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting through those interactions. The team realized that the winning metaphor wasn’t a digital superhighway, with traffic speeding along a well-defined path, and fixed exit and entrance ramps controlled by the big players. The internet was instead like a web—something alive with unanticipated, multivariate, multidimensional dynamism; something organic, messy, hard to explain, and constantly extending itself. In fact, they didn’t think in terms of whether they agreed or disagreed with the notion of a digital superhighway. They were thinking independently about the problems they faced. They weren’t contrarian in the sense that they disagreed with the conventional wisdom. They were solving the problems they were independently interested in, from a wholly different perspective. Their different perspective led to Mosaic, the first user-friendly internet browser that would cross over into the mainstream. It would start a revolution.
Surfing the waves of the future
Mosaic’s story illustrates an important lesson about founders who create a breakthrough: they’re almost always living in the future, immersed in the process of cultivating new patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting through ongoing interaction with new, empowering technologies and with other people who are also living in the future.
Most people have the wrong idea about how breakthrough ideas develop. They tend to think it’s about having a “vision”—as if someone is seeing farther over the horizon than others through a better pair of binoculars. Or they are simply struck by an idea, the way Isaac Newton supposedly came up with the theory of gravity when he was hit on the head by a falling apple.
Most people think breakthrough insights come from having better ideas about the future. But the most effective approach I have seen to unearthing breakthrough insights comes from something more visceral. Breakthrough insights come from living in the future and tinkering directly with what’s new about it—not by having passing ideas about it from a distant vantage point.
Why is this?
Remember how we earlier said that pattern-breaking ideas introduce something new that creates radical change in how people think, feel, and act? Living in the future is the way you escape the baked-in assumptions of the status quo. It’s how you get directly acquainted with new assumptions that can lead to compelling insights.
You need to experience firsthand the new powers that inflections confer on people. By interacting with that thing—by using it, experimenting with it, probing its powers—and by interacting with other people who are also living in the future, you begin cultivating new patterns of behavior, different from those that characterize the status quo.
These new patterns enable you to break free from the constraints that shape the beliefs, desires, expectations, and ambitions of people living in the present. They enable you to see that the way people live at present isn’t compulsory. The world as it exists now—the world that is—represents just one way among many that the world could be.
To further clarify this idea of living in the future, and why it’s so vital, consider our next notable pattern breaker, Bob Metcalfe, the ethernet’s coinventor. In the 1970s, Bob was at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), which holds a unique place in the annals of computing history. Xerox PARC was the birthplace of game-changing technologies like the mouse, the windowing interface, and the laser printer, years before they were popularized by Apple and others. While there, Bob co-created the ethernet to enable all the people with these advanced Xerox computers to share a laser printer.
Bob likens his experience at Xerox PARC to living in a “time machine.” Even though the computers at PARC were expensive, it was clear to him that someday everyone would have computers quite like what he was working with. In his efforts to network computers at the lab to share one of the world’s first laser printers, he came to believe that his insights into interconnectivity would be valid someday for most computer users. This led him to start 3Com, one of the first major PC Ethernet companies. His insight was spot-on. Ethernet emerged as the leading networking standard due to its simplicity, adaptability, and versatility, seamlessly integrating local and wide area networks.
Marc Andreessen and Bob Metcalfe both tackled issues rooted in their advanced computing experiences, anticipating that their solutions would become essential for the broader public as technology evolved to match their current environment. Crucially, in both instances, Marc and Bob didn’t need to discard old habits to develop innovative solutions. Instead, by immersing themselves in environments representing a future that only a few were witnessing, they gained fresh perspectives. This direct experience with new challenges naturally guided them to nonobvious insights.
As we look back through history’s rearview mirror, it’s evident that both Brian Chesky and Mark Zuckerberg stand out not just as a pair of ambitious entrepreneurs, but as time travelers who were playing out a script from the future. They were living in an intriguingly different future when they started their companies.
Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, were unlikely candidates to be at the helm of big businesses in the early 2000s; heck, many were still wrestling with high school algebra. Yet Chesky and Zuckerberg, born in 1981 and 1984 respectively, were not only older Millennials; they were also notably some of the first from their generation to lead businesses that greatly influenced the early twenty-first century. It beckons the question: Were Zuckerberg and Chesky somehow glimpsing an alternative tomorrow when they were working on the ideas that led to Facebook and Airbnb? Was there a particular lens through which these two viewed the world that set them on such groundbreaking paths?
When we described the inflections for Airbnb, we categorized Millennials as digital natives. For them, digital wasn’t just an accessory; it was in the fabric of their everyday life experiences. The term “computer” for these folks didn’t just represent some adjunct tool; it was where life pulsated. These people matured with the internet as their playground, smartphones as their trusted sidekicks, and social media as their town square. Zuckerberg and Chesky, standing at the forefront of this wave, weren’t merely the latest up-and-coming tech leaders. They had a unique understanding of the preferences of digital natives, who were soon to become the most dynamic customers of emerging technology.
Another key difference had to do with how the technology they were interacting with was about to change how products could be built, not just how they were used. Before the year 2000, engineers at technology companies constantly looked for creative ways to work around constraints. Even though computers and networks kept improving, engineers faced limitations in processing power, memory, storage, and bandwidth. They had to creatively minimize negative experiences for customers in areas where the technology may have fallen short.
By 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, the limits imposed by those constraints flipped into abundant growth drivers. Broadband became widespread, enabling online services to reach vast audiences. Open-source software, like the LAMP stack, provided free critical infrastructure. Start-ups no longer had to buy expensive and proprietary hardware, databases, and tooling. Soon, Amazon Web Services would eliminate the need for start-ups to maintain their own infrastructure; start-ups could run and update their products in the cloud, bypassing the traditional cumbersome process of upgrading individual company-managed servers. This enabled founders like Zuckerberg to continually refine products based on real-time feedback and aggressively run growth-oriented experiments. And it allowed Brian Chesky to lean into his penchant for design-driven thinking and the customer experience without needing to worry as much about the plumbing that supported it. In other words, both founders learned about how to build technology businesses at the precise time when the assumptions about how to build them were about to change. There was now a new pattern for how to think about and execute the task of building and distributing new products. There was nothing for Brian and Mark to unlearn—it was the first and only model they had known, a gift from the future.
The biggest challenge to creating a breakthrough start-up is overcoming the limitations imposed by the established patterns of thinking shared by people living in the present. These patterns prevent most people, including potential founders, from recognizing inflections and the potential for radically different futures. Living in the future enables you to emerge with insights—the second essential element of inflection theory—into how the new things you’re interacting with can lead to a powerful and nonobvious insight that will make a significant difference for people in the future.
Finding what is missing in the future
Marc Andreessen and Bob Metcalfe each found their way to a breakthrough insight by solving a problem for themselves. They created a solution to a challenge they were already experiencing while living in the future. There’s a certain magic in crafting something with your own hands, for your own needs. As Paul Graham, the cofounder of Y Combinator, eloquently put it
Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake start-ups make is to solve problems no one has.
Why would so many people make such an obvious mistake? It’s because we often fall in love with our idea of the solution we want to build before falling in love with a problem that we experience while living in the future. “Falling in love with a solution” highlights the danger that founders, creators, or teams can become so enamored with their particular product or service—their “solution”—that they overlook whether it actually solves a real problem for their customers.
This can lead to developing products that are technically impressive or aesthetically pleasing, but that don’t resonate with users because they don’t solve a significant problem or improve people’s lives in a meaningful way.
Success comes from falling in love with the problem. By deeply understanding and caring about the problem, founders are more likely to build something people desperately want. Some problems deserve your love more than others. The best problems to chase are those that exist in the future. Pattern-breaking ideas are less about conjuring up the next big thing for tomorrow and more about genuinely understanding tomorrow’s problems before others are exposed to them.
But what if you’re not fortunate enough to be hanging out in a supercomputer lab or some other time machine at exactly the right moment? What if you don’t yet have an insight that meets your own burning desire to solve your own problem?
The good news is that there’s more than one way to live in the future and identify what’s missing there. Consider Okta, which provides customers with unified access to all their cloud apps. CEO Todd McKinnon was head of engineering for Salesforce when he and his colleague Frederic (Freddy) Kerrest cofounded Okta, first called Saasure, in 2009. Todd’s and Freddy’s roles at Salesforce, just when the company was starting to take off, had put them on the front lines of the cloud-computing revolution. It gave them a major advantage in understanding the challenges experienced by the pioneering customers who first adopted cloud computing. Todd and Freddy enjoyed informal yet trusting relationships with those clients, and this allowed Todd and Freddy to get to the crux of the clients’ most pressing issues. Both founders knew that the problems of their leading-edge customers were highly likely to be problems that lots of customers would face over time as cloud-based products became more mainstream.
Todd McKinnon’s situation was different from the prior examples we’ve described in an important way: his team was solving a problem for customers they knew were living in the future. Todd’s vantage point as vice president of engineering at Salesforce, a trailblazing company in cloud computing, gave him a proprietary view of the future, even if not quite as directly as if he’d been solving his own personal problem. Before Salesforce’s ascent, companies relied primarily on on-premises software, hosting their business software in-house on their own computers and data centers. Salesforce changed this by offering software that Salesforce managed on behalf of the customer in the cloud. Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s founder, highlighted the cloud’s benefits, like cost effectiveness, scalability, remote accessibility, and automated software updates.
While the early adoption phase had its skeptics, cloud computing’s value proposition gradually gained mainstream acceptance. What set Todd and Freddy apart? Their hands-on experience with Salesforce’s customers meant they knew the first true believers in cloud computing extremely well. Their experience at the leading edge revealed a new pattern: these clients were rapidly adopting other cloud services. And they were struggling with new issues as they expanded their use of cloud computing beyond Salesforce. As they deployed more and more cloud applications, they needed to create separate log-ins for each application their users wanted to access. They needed a solution that would allow each user to access all their cloud applications from one place with the same log-in.
Todd’s vantage point allowed him to foresee the day when business clients wouldn’t be using only Salesforce or Workday, but hundreds of cloud-based applications, each with a different password. Managing that would be a colossal pain. He could envision a day when lots of customers implemented a multitude of cloud offerings, not just the early believers he had interacted with.
Further, he saw that the challenge was already impacting those at the cutting edge of cloud adoption, and that the tools of the present wouldn’t suffice to address it.
If anybody could build a unified access management tool for early adopters of the cloud, it would be Todd and Freddy. Not only did they know the early customers and their pains, but the customers trusted them as fellow co-conspirators. They were members of the same tribe; the customers knew Todd and Freddy, and they knew their work at Salesforce and what they were building at Okta. Today, Okta has more than six thousand corporate customers, with hundreds of millions of users on its platform.
Okta is one example of a company that serves customers who live in the future. There are others, especially companies who intend to serve business customers. But what if you aren’t living in the future by solving a problem for yourself, the way Marc was, or living in the future by solving a problem for others whose problems you know firsthand, the way Todd did?
Can you transport yourself to the future? It turns out the answer is yes.
Excerpted from Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future by Mike Maples Jr. and Peter Ziebelman. Copyright © 2024. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Got the book and looking forward to reading it!
I always liked the line 'your solution is not my problem'. The issue is the problem set....silicon valley has a 'problem' problem. The greatest problems facing us are pretty clear but these are not well represented in that culture. Few years ago Chris Dixon said all the greatest minds were going into Web3...with no rationale as why.