http://www.paulgraham.com/ecw.html
When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world.
I absolutely believe there IS a "static world fallacy", and it gets particularly acute as you get older (and I'm not young).
A couple really obvious examples are say Apple's App Store, or Google AdWords. Huge companies have been built on those drastic changes in the environment. If you understood those things early, you had a tremendous advantage. AdWords was tremendously effective when it first came out. I know a number of people who built single-person companies on top of it.
Beware of hindsight bias: it's easy to think that those things were "obviously big", but there were plenty of other things going on at the time that you could have directed your attention toward.
> At any given time, there are dozens of industries operating within new and underserved markets that are experiencing rapid growth… This almost always represents a possible entrepreneurial opportunity.
His strategy might benefit from incorporating some of the things you mentioned — shifting demographics, new tech, etc.
Then again, one of the most common entrepreneurial mistakes is to develop a solution and go looking for a problem. That rarely works out, because most new tech doesn't have any business applications. It doesn't fit into the market.
So there's something to be said for a market-based approach, where you look for new things that people are actually paying for by examining high-growth industries, rather than simply looking at new tech.
IMO finding a market that is rapid growing is the most difficult part. It seems that I can never find a good idea worth pursuing.
The latter is reasonable. The former isn't. You should be able to come up with lots of ideas worth following up on.
Let's play a game. Someone give me a product category, and I'll list ideas that are at least worth more research.
- Made to order furniture. Let users design their own, or at least mix and match high level componets at a finer detail than ikea.
- High end IKEA. Combine the flexibility of Ikea with high end designs and materials.
- High level office furnishing service. Companies provide a high level description of their furnishing problem, rather than choosing specific items. I'm sure these consultants already exist, but maybe it can be done in a more automated, scalable way.
- bid/ask interface for used furniture markets. This would enable sellers to passively sell items.
- used marketplace that uses ML to extract features from pics. I think this may already exist. Not sure.
Very few pieces are composable, we need more things like https://www.prettypegs.com/ Unless you have the capability to build a new IKEA, this is to me the best venue for providing high quality customizability.
Finding furniture is a mess. There's missing information (dimensions, max load), close to useless search, and a bunch of places that sell the same things.
Out of the myriad shifts and adjustments that occur each year, some are clues to the presence of a substantial wave of change and, once assembled into a pattern, point to the fundamental forces at work. The evidence lies in plain sight, waiting for you to read its deeper meanings.
I would say Microsoft found a new market, so did Facebook and Google. Amazon is efficiency, so is Uber, and Tesla.
So there are new markets.
It's been a while since I read the book, but I don't think that's quite right. A market can be a "blue ocean" but be too small to support a billion dollar business. And you can certainly build a billion dollar business in a red ocean, if you just execute better than everybody else.
Now if one was to say "assuming sufficient size, it's easier to make a billion dollar company in a blue ocean market" then I think that would absolutely be true.