An app that…

I learned to code 35 years ago. For 30 years, I self identified as a techie. I still follow technology, but what I’ve learned in my greying-hair years is that technology is a tool. One of many. One that is generally best applied judiciously, if at all.

Meanwhile, the ongoing excitement about technology makes entrepreneurs think otherwise. This excitement goes back over 100 years, to the electrification and mechanization of the developed world, and more recently 35 years to the beginnings of the personal computer era.

It leads entrepreneurs to seriously think about what app is next needed, with their heads buried in a screen, rather than their heads held high, looking for real world problems to solve.

If I had a nickel for every business pitch I’ve seen and hear that begins with “an app that…”, I’d have a lot of nickels. If I installed every one of those app on my phone, the problems of the world and the problems of my life would be undiminished.

Startups exist not to build apps. Startups exist to solve problems. Problems that customers are willing to pay to solve.

Problem <– Solution <– Customers =====> Profits

If you need some technology to solve the problem, that’s fine. But when talking about what you do to investors or customers, lead with the problem. And if you must bury your head in a screen, think twice about whether that is the best solution.

You have a decision to make. If you have seconds to decide, you go with your gut. If you have minutes, you might take that minute to weigh Plan A with Plan B. If you have weeks you might create a pro-con list to help decide between those two – or even three – options. If you have months, you might take the time to brainstorm for some out-of-the-box options. What most people overlook is that there...

A few months ago I was interviewed on a podcast where the key question was “What is your superpower?” Sounds innocuous and simple, but it was one of those moments to reflect on life and not just provide a truthful answer, but something interesting and thought provoking. My answer was “If only”. What if _____? I’ve been an entrepreneur for over thirty years, founding or co-founding 10 companies. I...

I’m in a reprise mood this season… recently thinking about a blog post from 2015 with a lesson learned in an old movie on how to blow up a dam. A lesson about the expectations when making a big change to the world. The lesson comes from Force 10 from Navarone, starring Harrison Ford and Robert Shaw. This is a movie I first saw on a Sunday afternoon on TV as a pre-teen, and then dozen...

There are so many lessons in startups, startup investing, and technology adoption that come from looking back a few decades. For example, I’m out of the 1970s nostalgic computing rabbit hole, but that journey has subsequently led to reviewing the technological progress of the late 1900s and early 2000s. This week, that was the rise of the RISC-based CPU, which was then obviously going to...

The buzzword of 2024 is “AI” and like social, mobile, cloud, fintech, and blockchain, every startup is claiming to have it and every big startup fundraising is claiming to expand what can be done with it. Or in short, we’ve been here before. A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle does a very good job explaining how this will play out in 13 steps, and how it already played...