Thus begins Gen V, Generation Virtual

By now there are a lot of hot takes swirling from all of us cooped up at home about what the new normal will be. Virtual this, new world order that, the end of this bad thing, the beginning of this other thing. I don’t intend to add to that morass. Instead, my goal here is to contemplate how we as entrepreneurs ought to think about what is going down right now.  

TLDR: The old normal is gone. A new normal is here and a generational view seems to be a good metaphor.  

The best way I have come up with for thinking about the current paradigm shift we are in the middle of is that of generational change. Infrequently, yet throughout history, there are temporal shifts that radiate fundamental structural changes throughout human existence. Usually these are wars, political or societal revolutions, technological breakthroughs or rapid power shifts. History is replete with examples and it always will be.  

Thus, what we are going through is not actually new. It is unique and terrible in its own way, but we humans seem to be especially gifted in driving ourselves at high speeds into the walls of our incompetence. It is our nature.  

In retrospect, we see that the young people of these world changing moments are defined by and fundamentally different from those who came before them. The plasticity of their very being enables them to adapt and evolve to the new normal while the generations before, the old people, have become too rigid, brittle and stuck in the former context. Thus, the old are replaced and young come to power. Historically, the magnitude of these temporal changes define the relative prominence of the generation as massive change leads to massive competitive differentiation. Hence, the “Greatest Generation” has had a disproportionate impact as a result of World War Two versus those who came before or after them. Moreover, those generations who are lucky or unlucky enough to not go through such cataclysmic change usually simply recede into oblivion (see Gen X).

No one will argue against the fact we are at a generationally defining moment. The world has fundamentally changed and will not go back to normal. Virtual is replacing physical. The sudden withering of our ability to engage in the “real” world means exponential flowering of this virtual world. The infrastructure, habits, cultural norms and learnings we are now building will be like the construction of the interstate highway system in that there will be an exponential impact in highly unpredictable ways. From the highways came suburbs, shopping malls, car culture, and intense sociological revolution. By forcing everyone to instantly adapt to a virtual existence we are dramatically accelerating the long term trend and instantly advantaging those individuals and organizations who adapt to a world through a screen and leaving behind those who can’t. Moreover, the behaviors of yesterday have become obsolete overnight. When we emerge from this, the pre-virus normal will seem as archaic and stupid as all of our other replaced cultural, technological and political normative behaviors now seem.   

This exponential change is the crux of what I have been contemplating through the lens of the generational metaphor . 

When these massive changes occur the young generation is able to see them as what they are vs the older generations and their proclivity to see through the distorting lenses of their accumulated experience. We see this in a technology adoption life cycle where the initial ideas around a new technology are incremental derivations of preexisting metaphors and paradigms. Basically the old people just build a faster horse. Yet, new eyes see the world for what it is and they discover and build the new paradigms. For technology entrepreneurs the greatest impact comes at these moments of the technological generational change and their ability to see, define and build the new paradigm. Reading the history of technology, these defining moments are stark in their magnitude.   

We are clearly at one of those moments. Gen V has begun, the virtual generation is here. Great entrepreneurs will be defined by this moment and their works will change the world we live in.

My advice is to throw out what you thought you knew about your market and the products your customers want. What the market has taught you and reinforced in the years that came before is no longer true. The customers of yesterday are gone. Instead an entirely new set of needs and wants emerged overnight. Needs no one yet understands. Your job is to turn back to the first chapters of the startup playbook and to see the world for what it is now. To discover the new paradigm and to build for the new needs. What does the world need when no one can leave their homes? What new opportunities emerge if everyone is on video chat all day? How can you surprise and delight? We are in a brave new world and the entrepreneurs who discover its secrets will define a new generation. It is in these moments of cataclysmic change the greatest opportunities emerge to those who can see through the fog of chaos.