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With the caveat that often the only difference between being mad and visionary is if you ultimately succeed: startups.

At least, so long as they're not of the [buzzword]+[existing product] variety of startup. A decade ago we had "Uber for $[dictionary merge all nouns]", and today you can easily find a lot of people trying to shoehorn "blockchain" into things without any apparent understanding that other ledgers exist. Not those kinds of startup, those are all just copycat pander-to-the-investors schemes at best, and magical thinking at worst.

On a similar note about madness and vision: SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and SpinLaunch. SpaceX clearly has Mars as a big futuristic vision, and unlike say Blue Origin they actually make rapid progress in that direction; Rocket Lab may be small fry compared to SpaceX, but are thinking along similar scale for launch vehicles and have the political advantage of not being Elon Musk, so if Brand Musk implodes as I now expect it to, they may end up doing many similar things in practice; SpinLaunch may not be going anywhere fast, but they're aiming for a very different launch system and are therefore will end up in the history books even if they run out of investors.

A few years ago I would have also said Relativity Space, but these days everyone is 3D printing rockets. I've even seen a small 3D printed rocket engine in person, on display at one of the smaller booths in GITEX Europe last month, so Relativity Space no longer stands out for 3D printing rockets.

I have no idea where any of the AI companies are going. It looks like the sector is in a stage where there's a lot of low-hanging fruit, and therefore rapid improvements are relatively easy to stumble upon. But the same dynamics mean that's a red-ocean environment, whereas (IMO) the best innovation is a blue-ocean environment: https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/tools/red-ocean-vs-blue-oc...


specialist
Thanks. I'll check those out.

Hadn't heard the red- vs blue-ocean distinction before. Thanks. The bullet points are similar to Thiel's zero to one thesis. (Right?)

FWIW, I'm currently most excited by efforts addressing climate crisis. Like advanced geothermal, better heat pumps, improving the grid, etc.

If I understand, most would be considered blue-ocean.

Most definitely face the chicken & egg challenge. As in the merit and benefits are apparent. But someone has to underwrite lofting a new market(s) from scratch.

Cheers, Jason

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