In 1996 I went with Scott Cook to Stewart Alsop’s Agenda conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was a room full of the digerati, the people who were building and funding the digital world. Scott McNealy from Sun was there. Everyone was there. I sat next to Andy Grove in the audience. I met Bill Gates for the first time. On stage, people talked about how much they missed Apple and wished it would come back. I had just left the Navy. It was quite an experience.
Then someone in the audience stood up and asked a question. Does anybody here believe that a search engine nobody has ever heard of will end up becoming number one?
Nobody raised a hand. Not one person in a room full of the best digital minds in the world. That included me.
The company that answered his question did not even exist yet. Google was founded two years later. Within a few years after that, it was number one.
Inside the race.
Soon I was inside that market. Lycos acquired WiseWire, and I ran a unit of more than twenty-five products and about 350 people. Lycos was one of the leading search engines in a world that did not yet know the word Google. The portal race was at full speed. Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and a handful of others fought to be the front door to the internet. Every portal wanted to be the place where people started their day. Search, directory, news, email, home pages, communities, shopping. Whatever one portal launched, the others had to match within weeks.
Every portal was watching the others. Google was founded in 1998, while I was still at Lycos. The directory WiseWire had built for Lycos was real, and it was temporary. Search won.
The winner of a tornado is usually not the company everyone is watching. It is the company that found the right head pin while everyone else was watching the incumbents.
Not only are the market applications for disruptive technologies unknown at the time of their development, they are unknowable.
The nature of the curve.
The smartest room I have ever sat in could not see it. That is not a failure of intelligence. It is the nature of the curve. The incumbents fill your field of view, and the head pin is somewhere you are not looking.
I tell that story every time someone asks me to predict which company will win agentic commerce. Payments, retail, identity and banking all have incumbents with a great deal to protect. I do not know yet which segment of customers will let an agent act and pay on their behalf first. Nobody does. You cannot predict it. You uncover it.
Our job is not to guess right. Our job is to build the blocks so that whoever finds the head pin can pick them up and use them.
Stop predicting, start uncovering.
- Write your predictionName the company or segment you believe will win your market. Then write what would have to be true for you to be wrong.
- Look away from the incumbentsList the companies everyone in your field is watching. Then list three small ones nobody mentions, and what each one sees that the leaders do not.
- Watch for the lean-inTest, listen and watch for the customer who leans in when everyone else leans back.
- Build blocks, not betsAsk whether what you are building is useful no matter which segment turns out to be the head pin.
Quick answers.
Did anyone predict Google’s rise in 1996?
Rob Frasca recalls that at Stewart Alsop’s 1996 Agenda conference, someone asked whether an unknown search engine would become number one. Nobody in the room raised a hand. Google was founded two years later.
What does the Agenda 1996 story teach about predicting winners?
Rob Frasca says the winner of a tornado is usually not the company everyone is watching. He was in that room, then inside Lycos during the portal race, and Google came from outside it. He argues the winning segment has to be uncovered, not predicted.
Sources.
- Rob Frasca, The Creator’s Journey (forthcoming), Chapter XIV, When Agents Act.
- Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), Chapter 7, “Discovering New and Emerging Markets.” Wording checked against the O’Reilly edition. Source