Entrepreneurs, your moment is now :: WRAL.com

Editor’s note: Investor and tech entrepreneur David Gardner is the founding partner of Cofounders Capital in Durham and is a regular contributor to WRAL TechWire.

Sometimes I can’t believe how lucky I am to have lived through not one, but three, technology paradigm shifts. Each was wonderfully unique and yet, in at least one important way, exactly the same.   

The PC 

The first was the commercialization of the personal computer in the late ’70s. Suddenly, computing power no longer resided exclusively in mainframes or in the hands of the few large companies that could afford to own and operate them. We knew immediately that everything was about to change.

Entrepreneurs rushed to write software for these new machines, solving business problems of every kind and creating efficiencies and capabilities that had previously existed only in theory. Industry after industry adopted these better, faster, and cheaper innovations. IT became not just a part of the business – it was the business. Long-established industry giants were unseated. Silicon Valley became synonymous with venture capital, and fortunes were made.

The Internet

Then, in the 1990s, another paradigm shift turned the world upside down: the internet. Once again, we knew everything was about to change.

Massive, entrenched businesses collapsed. Entrepreneurs built online services so useful and so ubiquitous that today we can’t even imagine living without them. Unknown startups became household names, and many of the entrepreneurs and their investors accumulated unimaginable wealth.

AI

Surely this was more than I deserved, but late in my career, life offered one more extraordinary gift: artificial intelligence. Once again, we instantly recognize that everything is about to change. Business models will be turned upside down. As with previous paradigm shifts, no industry will be untouched and most will be changed radically. Industry giants will shudder and fortunes will be made – and lost.

Entrepreneurs have an unfair advantage

Entrepreneurs and startups have always had an unfair advantage when it comes to innovating and capitalizing on major paradigm shifts. They don’t have to navigate organizational politics, defend the status quo, or wait years for plans and budgets to be approved. They envision it, prototype it, show it to beta customers, gather feedback, and iterate until something magical happens on a timeline that large companies can only fantasize about.

That unfair advantage has always existed, but during a paradigm shift it is magnified exponentially. Startups can incorporate game-changing technology from a clean slate rather than retrofitting it into massively complex legacy systems. They aren’t constrained by long-established processes, policies, or assumptions. Because all of their customers are new, they don’t have to worry about migration strategies like how to move thousands of existing customers and their data onto an entirely new platform and way of working. And with AI, they can now build that software at a small fraction of the cost and dozens of times faster than ever before.

Conclusion 

The conclusion should be obvious. If you are an entrepreneur or an early-stage investor,your moment has arrived.  It may be decades before we see another paradigm shift like AI. In fact, this shift is so profound that it is highly unlikely we will encounter another opportunity of this scale in our lifetime. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to spread your wings as an entrepreneur or to write that check as a startup investor, you will never see a more opportune time than now.