The evolution of entrepreneurs from caveman to Elon Mask… ha..I am not going that far behind to caveman period. Think for a while how vastly different it is being an entrepreneur today versus a couple of decades ago. Internet in the late ’80s / early ’90s with .com boom to the present times of circular economies shaping up fast. Technology innovations are fueling entrepreneurs at an unprecedented pace, what I am referring to as “Technology Entrepreneurship” in this blog post.

Entrepreneurs have access to more capital, more technological tools, more information, more talent, and more computational power at par with if not more than the CEOs of the world’s biggest companies did just two decades ago.

Technology Entrepreneurship Mindset & Tools:

We are living in a world of abundance and exponential returns. In this blog post, let us discuss some of the key mindsets shifts today’s entrepreneurs should make and the advantage of having access to tools never existed before.

1. DISCIPLINED INNOVATION

If you aspire to become a successful Tech Entrepreneur, bring ideas to life fast. Disrupt yourself with a dIsciplined innovation expediting Ideate-Experiment-Refine cycles.

Technology entrepreneurship demands a faster understanding of the importance of action, rapid iteration, and experimentation. Try to follow Reid Hoffman’s philosophy: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

As such, exponential entrepreneurs understand the importance and means for rapid experimentation and iteration. They push tirelessly to reinvent and disrupt themselves.

They drive idea exchange and create a culture of idea interaction capable of fostering creative solutions to previously unsolvable problems.

They understand where, when, why and how breakthroughs happen inside the communities they create.

They know how to constantly keep their companies, ideas, and processes focused on the future, moving forward, and leveraging the latest exponential growth techniques in the pursuit of even bigger goals.

2. DEVELOP GROWTH MINDSET

Technology entrepreneurs can’t be local and linear thinkers in an exponential world. Human brains haven’t had a significant upgrade in over two million years, whereas our technology is doubling in power every 18 to 24 months.

Exponential technology is transforming products and services and disrupting industries. An exponential Mindset is key to success and often talk about my “6 Ds” framework – it’s a lens, and a roadmap, through which we can contextualize all technological change and opportunities. Here are the 6 Ds Progression

Digitized: Anything that becomes digitized enters the same exponential growth we see in computing. Digital information is easy to access, share, and distribute–it can spread at the speed of the internet. Once a product or service can be represented as “1s and 0s” – from biotechnology to music – it becomes an information-based technology and enters exponential growth.

Deceptive: Once something is digitized, its initial period of growth is deceptive because exponential trends don’t seem to grow fast at first. Doubling .01 only gets you 0.2, then 0.4, and so on. At this phase, everything looks like “zero.” But exponential growth really takes off after it breaks the whole-number barrier. 2 quickly becomes 32, which then becomes 32,000 before you know it. Nurture the following 6Ds of a growth mindset.

Disruptive: The existing market for a given product or service is disrupted by the new market that exponential technology creates because digital technologies outperform in terms of cost and effectiveness. Once you can stream music on your phone, why by CDs or records? If you can also snap, store, and share photographs, why buy a camera and film?

Demonetized: Money is increasingly removed from the equation as technology becomes cheaper—often to the point of being free. Software is less expensive to produce than hardware and copies are virtually free. You can now download any number of apps on your phone to access terabytes of information and enjoy a multitude of services at costs approaching zero.

Dematerialized: Separate physical products are removed from the equation. Technologies that were once bulky or expensive – cameras, GPS, phones, maps – are now all in a smartphone that fits in your pocket.

Democratized: Once something is digitized, more people have access to it. Powerful technologies are no longer only for governments, large organizations, or the wealthy.

Exponential entrepreneurs use the 6 Ds as a technological road map to predict where technologies are going and when to capitalize on the opportunities.

The framework gives them an unfair advantage over competitors.

How can you use the 6 Ds framework in your business and industry?

3. SEE ABUNDANCE NOT SCARCITY

“The mind is everything, what you think, you become.” An abundance mindset refers to the paradigm that there is plenty out there for everybody. … Another way of looking at this phenomenon is in terms of a scarcity mentality  versus an abundance mindset. Stephen Covey initially coined these terms in his best-selling book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Exponential entrepreneurs understand that technology is a force that transforms things from scarcity to abundance.

They have an Abundance Mindset.

Exponential tech is creating a world of Abundance in almost every major arena, including computation, education, energy, finance, healthcare, and transportation, among others. Once these industries transform from scarcity to abundance, their products and services become cheap (or free) and their quality goes through the roof.

Many things that we paid millions of dollars for just two decades ago are now available for free on our smartphones.

The challenge is that our minds evolved during a world of absolute scarcity, and most people are trapped in an unhealthy “Scarcity Mindset.”

In a world of scarcity, there is a limited pie. If your neighbor gets a slice, it means that you get a smaller slice. But with an Abundance Mindset, rather than slicing the pie into thinner and thinner pieces, we just bake more pies—millions more pies.

Exponential entrepreneurs also know that scarcity-minded, closed business models ultimately fail, and that open platforms ultimately win

4. LEVERAGE EXPONENTIAL TECHNOLOGIES

Exponential entrepreneurs experiment constantly and have a deep sense of curiosity about a group of exponentially growing technologies:

• 3D Printing
• AR, VR & Spatial Web
• Artificial Intelligence & Computation
• Blockchain
• Biotech & Longevity
• Material Sciences
• Robotics & Drones

Exponential entrepreneurs understand that these are the technologies that can transform and disrupt industries.

They see how these technologies are allowing individuals to do what was previously only possible by governments and the largest corporations.

And further, they know that today, you don’t have to become a technologist yourself, but instead take the first step: to understand the potential and implications of the technologies.

5. UNDERSTNDING MASSIVE TRANSFORMATIVE PURPOSE (MTP):

In 2014, Salim Ismail published Exponential Organizations, co-authored by Mike Malone and Yuri van Geest. In the book, the team analyzed the 100 fastest-growing organizations and synthesized their key traits. They discovered every single company on the list had a massive transformative purpose. In the simplest sense, an MTP is a “highly aspirational tagline” for an individual or group, like a company, organization, community, or social movement. It’s a huge and audacious purpose statement.

Here are few examples of MTP

1. TED: “Ideas worth spreading.”
2. Google: “Organize the world’s information.”
3. X Prize Foundation: “Bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.”
4. Tesla: “Accelerate the transition to sustainable transportation.”

Technology Entrepreneurship should possess a Massively Transformative Purpose (MTP) that drives them to power through hardship and attract the best talent to join them.

The most successful entrepreneurs then use their MTP to power their product or service that allows them to go 10X bigger or better while everyone else is pursuing incremental change.

Most businesspeople and companies ask questions such as, “How do we reduce costs by 10%?” Flip that by applying 10X thinking (or 1,000%) to all your efforts and challenges.

The best entrepreneurs subscribe to Google’s eight innovation principles, making them central to their startup mindset:

• Focus on the user
• Open will win
• Ideas can come from everywhere
• Think big, but start small
• Never fail to fail
• Spark with imagination, fuel with data
• Be a platform, float all boats
• Have a mission that matters

6. CROWDSOURCING INNOVATION & EXPERTISE

Exponential entrepreneurs can crowdsource nearly everything they need – ideas, capital, design, software – to grow their company.

And they take advantage of these abundant resources.

We live in a hyper-connected world of 4.5 billion, growing to 7 billion+. Around the world, the cognitive surplus can help you build your products, services, and drive innovation—regardless of your company’s size.

As Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems once said, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

With current technology, people can work from anywhere in the world at any time, and large corporations can tap into this global knowledge base to improve their systems.

Perhaps one of the most powerful aspects of the crowd is its ability to provide you with capital: either in the form of equity or advanced market commitments. Crowdfunding has grown into an opportunity worth multi-tens-of-billions of dollars, providing more capital to today’s startup game than any time ever in human history.

Access to startup capital is no longer scarce.

There are proven ways to run a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign. For exponential entrepreneurs, these capabilities are second nature.

Finally, you can create incentive competitions through platforms such as HeroX.com that allow you to crowdsource technologies, designs, solutions… whatever you want. This is an important tool in your tool chest.

All you need to know is exactly what you want.

If you do, in most cases, the crowd can do the rest.

We live in incredible times.

The potential for entrepreneurs to disrupt industries has never been greater.

Related Reading: Disciplined Innovation

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