Chapter 1
Mindset #1: Trust your
crazy ideas
Do you remember Appleâs iconic TV campaign from the 1990s featuring scientists, artists and mavericks, with the famous grammatically questionable tagline âThink Differentâ?
Hereâs to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. Theyâre not fond of rules ⌠You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you canât do is ignore them.
Entrepreneurs think differently too, which is why entrepreneurship often attracts the crazy ones, the ones prone to breaking the rules, the ones who donât say, âWhy?â but âWhy not?â This âcrazinessâ is often borne out of a passion â a passion to right a wrong, make a difference, solve a problem, make a million.
This begs the question, âWhatâs the difference between someone being seen as crazy and someone being seen as visionary?â The answer? The crazy ones just take longer to give up. Jeff Bezosâ Amazon started in 1994 but didnât turn a profit until 2001. Alibabaâs Jack Ma and Googleâs Sergey Brin and Larry Page also struggled to make money in the early days. Yet all persisted and stuck to their vision in the face of immense criticism and public pressure.
People said Trump was crazy when he declared in the 1990s he would one day become President of the United States.
People said Musk was crazy when he said that Mars travel would become a commercial reality.
Trumpâs and Muskâs crazy ideas took nearly two decades to manifest, and here we are, watching the consequences of those ideas play out in our news feed each day. When an entrepreneurâs audacious idea fails, theyâre considered crazy. When their idea succeeds, theyâre considered visionary. Musk is both crazy and visionary. As for Trump? History will be the judge on that one.
From zero to hero
Take a look at some of the crazy ideas that are succeeding right here in Australia and youâll realise that anything is possible. And the factors of digital disruption are compressing the time frames, which means fortunes that would have taken a lifetime to amass are now being made within years, as evidenced by former corporate executive-turned fashion entrepreneur Jane Lu, founder of Showpo. What started off with a laptop and two shelves of clothing is now an online juggernaut. Janeâs business got started in her parentsâ garage, became a pop-up store, then a retail store and is now a pure-play online retailer thatâs dominating the fast fashion market.
Showpo
What started off in 2010 as a pop-up store is now an online global fashion empire, shipping to 80 countries. Through being disruptive in the retail space and capitalising on the use of social media, Showpo now boasts a cult social following of more than 2.9 million. On track to turn over $100 million by 2020, Jane Luâs days of being a cubicle warrior at Ernst & Young (EY) are well and truly over.
Just as Jane Lu harnessed the power of social to create a business from nothing, the founders of digital marketplace Envato created a digital product out of thin air and leveraged the âcreativity of the crowdâ to make that creativity accessible to a global market.
Envato
Envato is a group of digital marketplaces that sells creative assets for web designers â assets such as themes, graphics, video, audio, photography and 3D models. Its co-founders Collis and Cyan Taâeed worked out of a Bondi garage, putting everything on the line to build the startup. Most people at the time called their idea âbizarreâ. Not anymore. Envato has more than eight million community members, and five million digital items for sale. The couple were listed in the top 10 of the 2016 BRW Young Rich List.
Not all startups start in garages, but an uncommon number do. Amazon, Apple, Disney, Google and HP are just a few that did.
What is pure-play?
Pure-play operators donât have retail storefronts. They can only be found online.
Sometimes a crazy idea is borne out of necessity, as Sandy Abram found when she realised that people wanted to shop according to their values.
Wholesome Hub
Melbourne entrepreneur Sandy Abram started Wholesome Hub, an organic food and grocery marketplace, due to a medical condition that compelled her to investigate the healing power of organics and to treat food as medicine.
Her âpinch of saltâ is that people can search for products on her website based on the values that are important to them. She now stocks 1000 products and has more than 3000 customers. Sheâs only been in business for a few years but sheâs rapidly snaffling market share from the bigger players by making it easier for people to find the products they need.
So, whatâs going on? Whatâs enabling these crazy ideas, and many others like them, to succeed so quickly?
Why are crazy ideas succeeding?
Whatâs driving this phenomenon is information. As Ray Kurzweil, Googleâs director of engineering, observed, âOnce any domain, discipline, technology or industry becomes information-enabled and powered by information flows, its price/performance begins doubling approximately annually.â1
What is Mooreâs Law?
A book about the technology revolution would not be complete without a mention of Mooreâs Law. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, famously predicted in 1965 that the overall processing power for computers would double every two years. He believed this would happen because he could see that the number of transistors you could fit onto an integrated circuit (per square inch) was doubling every year since their invention and would continue to do so. In other words, the computers would get smaller and faster.
And the doubling pattern as described in Mooreâs Law doesnât stop. We design faster computers, which in turn enables us to build faster computers, and so on. Itâs like a hallway of mirrors. We are living in unprecedented times. Never in human history have we seen so many disparate but connected technologies moving at such a pace. There are many technological factors underpinning these changes. Letâs look at the main four, which are loose...
