The concept of building holds mythic status in the world of new venture creation, and the mythos often obscures the difficulty. In construction, there are no such illusions. Construction is a $2 trillion U.S./$13 trillion global industry where automation has barely scratched the surface of possibility. Beneath that surface is dirt—unfathomable amounts. For new housing subdivisions, commercial real estate developments, data centers to power the AI boom, highway expansions, and countless other projects, American abundance begins with dirt.
Ask anyone who’s ever begun a term paper the night before it’s due: there are stark tradeoffs between research time and research quality. This is especially true of primary user research, one of the fundamental ways large enterprises can ensure their products resonate with customers. Historically, this has required a choice between user interviews, which are high-fidelity but slow, manual, and expensive, and surveys, which are scalable, cheaper, and faster, but often result in unrefined, low-signal data. Although there have been some strong companies on the survey side, e.g. Qualtrics and Medallia, this uneasy compromise has always persisted—until now.
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This paper draws on the work of economist Carlota Perez in developing the thesis that private technology companies are not in a speculative bubble. We argue instead that the world is currently in the "golden age" of the technological revolution set off by the invention of the internet.
This paper discusses a feedback cycle unleashed by the mobile ecosystem in the SMB space. As customer acquisition costs plummet for software vendors and SMBs benefit from new data and technology, hundreds of billions of dollars of value is being created.
This paper discusses the most important challenge faced by entrepreneurs building tech companies, and offers several foundational areas of focus for leaders tackling this issue.
This paper highlights the risks of investing blindly in what is popular and differentiates Smart Enterprise from ‘Big Data’.
This paper describes the market opportunity for start-ups that are bold enough to tackle business-to-government services and business models.
This paper describes a critical dimension of competitive advantage: building enterprise technology platforms that become the underlying infrastructure for valuable ecosystems of applications.
This paper describes the urgent need and unprecedented opportunity for Smart Enterprise platforms to enable app-driven innovation and disrupt large, old-line industries. There exist a variety of network effects and winner-take-all dynamics during this one-time event in which the original, closed technology infrastructure in these industries is opened up, and upgraded to leverage big data.
This paper discusses the theory and practice behind winning pre-growth investments.
This paper discusses the present age of creative destruction. New technologies will disrupt major industries, creating a large transfer of wealth and power in the global economy.
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