This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Backcasting and Inflection Points" created on August 26, 2020, featuring a discussion led by Ann Miura-Ko and other speakers about the concept of backcasting in entrepreneurship, the importance of insight development before customer development, and examples of visionary entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen.
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Before you even get to customer development.
You have a product.
How do you even come up with.
The idea for what you ought to pursue at floodgate?
Because a lot of times we are.
Working with founders who are extraordinarily talented.
And perhaps don't have an idea.
One of the areas that we work.
On is what we call backcasting.
And I think a lot of this has to do with insight development, which has to happen before customer development. And so back casting is again, this idea that the best entrepreneurs don't just respond to a future vision, they create a future vision. They create the future literally out of nothing. And that future, when you describe it today, 10 years out, might look plausible, improbable, and maybe even impossible. And depending on that spectrum, you actually have to build a lot more. Right? So a great example of an entrepreneur who will espouse something that sounds impossible.
And seems to time and time again.
Hit the nail is Elon Musk. Right?
So he'll describe something that sounds insane, right?
A rocket ship that goes up, up into the air and then the fuel canisters will land back on earth and.
It'S a private company.
Well, you would say that sounds crazy and rather impossible. Only governments can do that. And yet he will give you the.
First principles of why it's possible.
An implausible might be Marc Andreessen when he's describing Netscape. Back in the day, the Internet was a bunch of texts. It was looked like a terminal. And he's basically creating a browser that makes the Internet more accessible for all. All of these innovations that describe something far out. Those are founders who are building a completely new future. What do they have in common? Well, they have an insight usually about an inflection point. And an insight to me is an observation of something that is changing rapidly. And that inflection point usually describes something that's exponential and it's something around an adoption, a technology shift or regulatory shift. And that shift is creating something that has this exponential feature to it, which might mean people are suddenly changing their.
Behavior and adopting something very suddenly.
Telemedicine today is a really good example of that. And my partner Mike Maples has written.
Quite a bit about backcasting. But we think that that is through.
The first ingredient for venture backable venture scale business is you have to be.
Riding on this exponential curve and you.
Have to personally have an insight about that exponential curve that is non consensus, but right. So it is something not everyone agrees about. Because if everyone already observed this exponential.
Growth pattern or this thing that's about to happen.
Well, then, game over. There's no room for a startup. So what's your unique secret insight that.
You have about something that's about to change that gives you the surface area of attack? So that, to me is the back casting and inflection points concept.
