Ten problems your next business can fix

Many people are always saying they don’t want to start a company because they have a lack of innovative ideas on what the company should be about. The most successful companies do not focus on a solution, they focus on a problem. Google saw that with an ever expanding Internet, people had a hard time finding the right website. Mark Zuckerberg saw that students wanted to know the relationship status of fellow students and then discovered billions like to brag and gossip. Netflix wanted to make it easier to entertain you. Tesla to make greener and more fun to drive cars.

So what are ten problems your next venture can focus on?

How to make money with unlimited electricity?

It seemed only yesterday that energy prices went through the roof due to Russia attacking Ukraine. Now everybody is installing solar panels like crazy and wind farms are popping up everywhere. EVs are making batteries cheaper every day. The amount of days that we are producing more electricity than what we need is steadily going up. Soon most of the days we will produce more electricity than what we need. Finding innovative new usage for this excessive energy will be a really lucrative problem to solve.

Too much speed will kill you

3G, 4G, 5G,… has been the only thing telecom operators cared about. More speed was going to save the industry. Now we got to the point where the average user does not need more speed any more. Customers need more value and more reliability, not more speed. What will be the next business model to offer customers value over speed? Many telecom businesses are walking zombies. Infrastructure and spectrum will soon be up for sale for cents on the dollar.

What to do with the overcapacity of car manufacturers?

China is playing Russian roulette with traditional car manufacturers. They however are changing the rules. The gun is fully loaded and instead of pointing it to their own head, they point the gun to their competitors heads. Robotaxis will soon make the demand for cars go down 10x because ten families can share one robotaxi. What can you do with all those soon to be empty internal combustion car plants and millions of skilled workers?

How to make us all love vegan?

Our earth is reaching capacity when it comes to meat production. Methane is killing our environment. We need to stop meat and dairy production and become vegan food lovers to save our planet. How can we make the biggest carnivores into vegans?

Rethinking our financial system

The US dollar has been the crown jewel of currencies. Oil prices are directly linked to dollars. Banks hold all our savings and provide all our loans. A network of intermediaries and plastic cards are used to pay for most things. We use stock markets to buy investments. Those were the foundations of our financial system. Asset tokenization and decentralised finance will transform the industry. Ultra efficient fully automated decentralised financial markets are possible where buyers and sellers, payments, loans,… are settled without intermediaries. How will the future of the financial services industry work if being an intermediary is no longer profitable or even required?

Billions will lose their jobs

AI is every day in the news. Most office workers are now hooked on ChatGPT. The more you use AI the better it gets. The better it gets, the less office workers you need. We will need exponentially less lawyers, programmers, social media marketers, … Companies will start firing excess office workers at scales we have never seen before. What work can all these experts do?

Large companies will start failing??

Most industries will see massive amounts of change. We already touched on car manufacturing, telcos, financial services, legal, IT, marketing, online sales,… The list of industries that will NOT be transformed by AI, cheap energy, … will be short. We used to organise work into larger and larger companies because having the biggest sales team, the biggest R&D budget, the biggest operational capacity, … were the recipes of success. More people meant more business. AI and other technology disruptions are breaking that link. Survival of the fittest will be the new rule. Unfortunately the biggest vulnerability for corporations is massive change. Resistance to change is a foundational element of a corporation. Corporations are there to sustain the status quo in which they are the leader. Lots of industries will see their leaders fail. How can you take advantage?

The legal system is broken

With AI anybody can be a lawyer but our legal system is not prepared to provide justice for 8B lawyers. It was already too slow and too skewed towards the rich and powerful. Now it will be inundated with lawsuits from central bankers trying to stop crypto, unfair dismissals, bankruptcy procedures,… How can we provide justice on the same day?

But nothing compared to our political system

If we think our legal system is broken, what about our political system? We had leaders of democratic countries playing the BS bingo very well but now you can play liar bingo. It has become ok to vote for openly racist parties because all the bad things that happen in the world are always because some migrants take a boat or climb a wall. How do we avoid some of the biggest democracies failing?

Next quarter it will all be fixed

The reason we have CEOs, CFOs and COOs is because the COO can focus on this quarter’s operational problems, the CFO can focus on this quarter’s financial problems so the CEO is free to think about the long-term strategy. Wall Street has made the CEO focus more and more short term because you will spend tens of years climbing the ladder to be at the top for a few years if not months. Most CEOs don’t have the time to focus on the bigger picture and the long-term. They focus on how to make the quarter numbers. Mostly because they spend more time being a CFO or COO than being a CEO. Also the way to optimise a CEOs bonus is doing as little CEO work as possible. How are we going to fix the other nine problems if the people we pay millions to do it are busy?

Conclusion

The company you work for is more likely going to fail in the next few years than to grow. Perhaps becoming an entrepreneur isn’t that risky any more? Please let me know how I can be of any further assistance…