Envisioning Tomorrow
The good thing about writing on a blog for myself is that I can cover a wide range of topics without worrying about perfection or what others will think. I can also use the blog to explore new topics. This series is about one such idea – how entrepreneurs are worldbuilders.
I have been watching Silo on AppleTV. Until I came across a review about the series, I had not heard about Silo. I love science-fiction set in different worlds. Silo was exactly that. It is a dystopian series about people living underground because the world outside is uninhabitable (or so it is claimed). Since the series is based on books by Hugh Howey, I started exploring the back story. I was fascinated by what I read. The word which stayed with me was worldbuilding. I had read about it previously in the context of what JRR Tolkien had done with Middle Earth and “Lord of the Rings” and then George Lucas had done with “Star Wars.”
It was also the time when I was thinking about how new ideas like Email Shops could improve the inbox experience for consumers and thus improve conversion rates for eCommerce brands. For that, I had started to imagine how these emails would look, how consumers would react, and what the outcomes would be. I was also thinking about new technologies which could make the shopping process much better so brands could get more from their existing customers, reduce their AdWaste, and become more profitable.
There was a third angle that came in. I was chatting with a few friends on our weekly Saturday night call. Atanu Dey spoke about how we are going to see a revolution in the next 10-15 years – something on the scale of the Industrial Revolution – thanks to rapid advances in AI and Energy. We cannot extrapolate from the past to imagine the future. A person living in the early 1700s could not have thought through how life will be completely changed in the next few centuries. Our brains are wired to think linearly; we cannot fathom exponential change – and that is what we are on the cusp of.
And then a connection happened. Worldbuilding is what entrepreneurs did! As someone selling a new idea to skeptical audiences about innovations which are exponential in their outcomes, entrepreneurs must make people imagine a dramatically different future. I did that when I was pitching Internet websites to businesses in India in the mid-1990s, and how the Internet will eliminate the barrier of distance for information, communications, and commerce. Even I could not have grasped the changes which would happen in less than a generation.
Entrepreneurs live in and build tomorrow’s world. For this, they must persuade those around them – co-founders, first employees, investors, and first customers. They have to bring to life a tomorrow which seems like fiction to many and yet is just around the corner. Entrepreneurs need to set and sell stories in this new world, just like how some writers have been doing. Worldbuilding and storytelling are the tools entrepreneurs use to make their breakthrough ideas and products succeed.
