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Comment by lebek | Hacker News Reader

What mattered was seeing the value of the capability, not predicting any particular applications

How can you separate the value of a capability from its potential applications? Surely he doesn't mean scientific/intellectual value so.. how else can a capability have value?

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In product as a platform, you may understand that there are problems in a particular space, but you may not understand the problems. However, you may understand how a platform might enable the solving of problems, while not really understanding all the problems that will be solved themselves. Generally to be sure of this you should see at least 2 or 3 solutions that you could have conviction in, but understand that entablement would solve very many tangential problems to those you have conviction in is more important. You can somewhat use this to size a future ecosystem market, but you have to be wary about your predictions of the number of solutions you enable. You're also very much fighting too early or just right in terms of timing. Looking for solutions to problems will help you judge the value of the capability, but trying to predict all the applications of those solutions is a fool's errand.

That quote stood out to me too. My question is, if there is a new capability (Bitcoin is a good example) then how do you invest in that capability? Sure you can pick a company working on some application, but they will almost certainly miss the real value of the capability.

Missing real value can be the same as showing potential value. If you have conviction there is real value, then you're banking on many misses, some capturing most of it and a fewer number using it to it's potential. From there things like commoditization come into play. However, you should be mindful of tying capability to value, just because something is capable does not also mean it must be adopted as valuable. Plenty of things that are not particularly capable are overvalued, and many things that are incredibly capable are under valued. I think the important part to look at is does this capability accessibility solve very many problems. If so, then you can start to think about a few solutions, but it isn't meaningful to try and understand all the applications of the solutions (because you typically don't understand that abstract customer). Cloud is a good example of this.

"how do you invest in that capability?"

It's not clear to me that you can. How would you have invested in air travel in the time of the Wright brothers? None of the companies that eventually came to dominate existed then.

I think in this light you either invest in an inventor or radical innovator, or a component of their supply chain. One is: I'm going to make this happen and all these things will happen, the other is: this thing is happening so we should should to these things. This is why the path from venture (paradigm shift) to public (shifted) is important, the best public companies indicate a fundamental in other businesses, they are enablers. However, over time you become a commodity item on a supply chain and run risk the "enabled" companies will out innovating you as they build their capabilities and margins .

The article talks about superpowers, which I take to mean the technology can do some general thing that could not be done before. In that case people can invent a great many specific things to do with it, and so in is likely inevitable some of them will be great successes. So the fact that when it is first invented a given individual can't think of a specific use that would be very valuable doesn't mean much.

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