“It seems likely that the biggest progress in the next 50 years may come not from improvements in technology but in psychology and design thinking” - Rory Sutherland 1. It doesn’t pay to be logical when everybody else is being logical Most of the greatest entrepreneurial successes started as completely illogical ideas that made no sense. In 2008, the year Airbnb was founded, the company was looking to raise $150,000 for 10% of the company. The founders approached seven prominent venture capital firms who all said no (actually, two didn’t even respond). You can’t blame these VCs for thinking that opening private homes to complete strangers was a weird and illogical idea. The biggest business opportunities are in the land of contrarians, by focusing on markets and models that are counter intuitive and go against the consensus. Intuition and consensus only leads to crowded markets with lots of competitors and pricing pressures. So, the big question is, how can we let go of logic so we can generate brilliant ideas? A good start is reading Rory Sutherland’s book, Alchemy. Here is a
Travel Tech Essentialist #40: Thinking Illogically
Travel Tech Essentialist #40: Thinking…
Travel Tech Essentialist #40: Thinking Illogically
“It seems likely that the biggest progress in the next 50 years may come not from improvements in technology but in psychology and design thinking” - Rory Sutherland 1. It doesn’t pay to be logical when everybody else is being logical Most of the greatest entrepreneurial successes started as completely illogical ideas that made no sense. In 2008, the year Airbnb was founded, the company was looking to raise $150,000 for 10% of the company. The founders approached seven prominent venture capital firms who all said no (actually, two didn’t even respond). You can’t blame these VCs for thinking that opening private homes to complete strangers was a weird and illogical idea. The biggest business opportunities are in the land of contrarians, by focusing on markets and models that are counter intuitive and go against the consensus. Intuition and consensus only leads to crowded markets with lots of competitors and pricing pressures. So, the big question is, how can we let go of logic so we can generate brilliant ideas? A good start is reading Rory Sutherland’s book, Alchemy. Here is a