Investors love to talk about big trends.
There’s nothing wrong with this. I read dozens of articles and engage in dozens of conversations each week on this.
But sometimes what I read and what I hear can get a little glib, if not downright misleading.
Just this morning I read that the next big thing is disrupting our old transportation systems. This was from a co-founder of a unicorn startup.
A founder of another unicorn said the next big thing is creating intimate experiences by connecting large groups of people.
I can only imagine these founders want to keep their best ideas for themselves. There’s no other explanation. Not only are the ones they mention generic, but startups are all over them.
Fact is, deciphering trends to determine the next big one is hard. Investment ideas – like clothes and cars – tend to go through cycles, moving in and out of fashion.
Energy disruption was big, then it faded, and now it’s coming back. Batteries, wearables and 3-D printing have all had back-and-forth rides.
For early investors, it’s doubly hard. Our ride is long and often bumpy. The sexy vehicle of today could look like crap in a few years. We have to think about what our vehicle will look like in five or 10 years.
How do you do that with any degree of certainty?
It’s something I’ve been wrestling with for quite a while. And I have an interesting solution to share with you.
Just in Time
It’s a way to identify “can’t fail” trends. I call them “just in time” technologies. They’re technology solutions that arrive in the nick of time to fix a big looming and sometimes dangerous economic or societal problem.
They’re impervious to fickle consumer tastes. They overcome regulatory hurdles because governments have no other choice but to encourage their adoption (or at the very least stand aside).
But here’s the odd thing…
These trends – the ones that have the highest odds of driving huge markets – are also often the ones that the mainstream press presents to us as major threats or problems unto themselves.
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