Maybe now is when that bad idea will actually transform the company

I really enjoyed Benedict Evans’s annual tech trends presentation. It’s worth going through in its entirety.

One of the ideas in the presentation is that as of 2019, the world is a very Internet-enabled place. There are 5.5bn people on earth, and 4bn have a smartphone.

Now that we’re all online, all sorts of new businesses can be built that weren’t possible a decade or two ago. This has enabled the explosion of D2C e-commerce, platforms to support e-commerce (e.g. Amazon third-party, Shopify) and Netflix / Prime Video (at the expense of paid TV subscriptions).

Indeed:

I think this idea is broadly applicable.

Changing circumstances —> lots of new possibilities.

That failed marketing campaign? Maybe it was actually the ‘then’ website capabilities.

That failed product launch? Maybe it was just pricing.

That failed new hire? Maybe it was the wrong role spec.

Companies are complex systems and the dynamics are always changing. In the modern era, healthy growth company capabilities tend to get exponentially better over the course of a year or two - more and better data, better tech, better insight, better team collaboration.

Maybe now is when that bad idea will actually transform the company.