#10YearChallenge
In the world of technology, everything moves at an unbelievable pace. 10 years ago, I speculated that ‘in the future’ we might be watching HD video on our phone while browsing the internet, all on our mobile device…and that we might have mobile devices where one screen unfolds into two — I even wrote a patent on it! Executives rolled their eyes, as back then it seemed like science fiction. Look where we are now!
In 2009, I was a product manager at Samsung Electronics, planning and managing the development cycles of Samsung’s System-on-Chip (SoC) processors that would power the first iPhones and Galaxy smartphones. A critical part of our team’s mandate was to define product features based on market research, customer input, internal tech readiness, etc. Complex semiconductors have long development lead times and require dozens of dedicated engineers — so you better be damn sure your product isn’t over-spec’d (direct correlation to higher cost) or under-spec’d (direct correlation to losing a customer). The challenge is that due to lead times, the product specs are defined 2~3 years before the first end product (i.e., the smartphone) hits the market: ~1 year for processor dev cycle, ~1 year for smartphone development + testing, etc. You can imagine, in the world of rapid technology advances, how hard it is to see 2–3 years into the future.
In 2009, we proposed a 1GHz processor capable of playing HD video and advanced graphics on a mobile device. This would be the most complex semiconductor product ever for Samsung. In the process of getting the product development kicked off, there was a never ending stream of questions that were really variations of: “Why the hell would you ever need 1GHz of processing on a mobile device??” To be honest…I had no clue. Just five years earlier, my PC in college had run on 667MHz. In 2009, sleek laptops (at least they seemed verrry sleek at the time) were being released and they seemed to cover all of our portable computing needs. So why would we need these media features on our phones when we could use laptops with bigger screens? With the launch of the iPhone and the increasing popularity of portable media and location based services, the use cases for devices with a ‘tiny screen’ were certainly expanding — just enough for my imagination to run wild.
One of the use cases that I pitched to execs was a future in which we’d play high resolution gaming at 60fps, while projecting the screen via WiFi or HDMI to our TVs. I frankly couldn’t think of a great reason why we’d actually do that, but 10 years later we have the explosive popularity of the Nintendo Switch…which basically does exactly that.
Fast forward 10 years and I am now making investments in early stage startups. In many cases, it will take 10 more years for the technology and business model innovations of these startups to really become mainstream. Our job is to a) identify early trends and imagine the future as I did with mobile services in 2009, and b) find the entrepreneurs who actually started driving the innovation before it became a ‘trend.’ Our most recent investment in Beeswax was driven by the rapidly growing trend of marketers wanting to cut out the middle man and maintain full control of their own data and digital marketing strategies. As veterans in the adtech industry, Beeswax’s founders identified adtech’s key pain points before they became a key issue of the industry, and set out to build a solution to address those needs before today’s movement of digital advertising in-housing became a trend.
The long feedback loops of venture make it really hard to know if our predictions were right or wrong. But dreaming about what the world might look like in 10 years and backing ambitious entrepreneurs on a mission to make those dreams a reality is what makes our jobs so exciting.
