It has been true for quite awhile but this past year made it starkly clear: We now live in a high-velocity world.
Change is constant. But now it’s also happening at lightning pace. What was true yesterday, may not be true today. What worked then, may not work now. What was popular one day, can tumble the next.
It can feel jarring. We all are trying to find our footing. As we do though, we can start to see how this high-velocity world also holds a limitless smorgasbord of opportunity.
In this new world, small ideas can be exponentially amplified to have global ripple effects.
Using the power of networks such as Reddit and democratized investing platforms like Robinhood, we’ve seen how individual investors can change the trajectories of Fortune 500 companies, financial firms investment strategies and - in some cases - their own personal fortunes.
Apps like TikTok ingrain themselves in our lives seemingly overnight, and creators on them can move from obscurity to global popularity in a matter of hours. These dramatic swings upend the way people interact with social media, setting off a ripple effect among the platforms hosting them, the businesses and people using them and advertising on them, and the flows of money and attention to them.
The speed at which ideas can spread is also re-shaping investing and the financial markets. In 2021 thus far $288 billion in venture capital has been invested in companies - more than 2 times all of 2020. So far this year 291 companies have achieved unicorn status. In 2020 that number was 175 and in 2011, it was a mere 16. But, this isn’t your father’s venture capital. Through SEC rule changes and sites like WeFunder and Republic, everybody can now be an angel investor.
Never before has there been so much potential for someone wondering, “What if we….”
But to take full advantage of this potential and to create as many ripples as possible, we must embrace new methods for innovation. You wouldn’t bring a Model T to the Grand Prix and we can’t bring the methods of decades past to the race for digital innovation. We must close the book on the era where it was believed that
- idea generation was unique to major tech hubs like Silicon Valley, New York or Austin
- only ideas that seem venture-capital ready on day one are worthy of pursuit
- we have to go all-in by starting a company before we’ve ever given our ideas a go in small ways.
Ideas actually are everywhere. Many more are worthy of testing than are getting tested. Many more could have ripple effects - effects we can’t even foresee now but may be obvious in the near future.
We need new methods. Specifically, we need to become experts at
generating (finding) as many ideas as possible; and
rapidly testing them through experimentation.
This is exactly what we are doing at Builders + Backers.
- Lowering the barriers so anyone can put their ideas to work.
- Searching for and discovering the highest potential ideas and highest capacity people.
- Giving them space to put their ideas into action without first forcing them to launch a newco.
- Helping them do that by designing and running experiments to test things out.
- Funding and scaling the ideas that work.
- And then giving back from those returns to the next round of idea generators.
In doing so, we’ve kickstarted a nationwide flywheel of ideas, experiments, solutions and scale for this new, high-velocity world.
Learn more about the Builders experimenting with their ideas in our Idea Accelerator program right now!