Scientists and engineers work on pushing the boundaries of technology and turning the impossible into reality. They tackle interplanetary travel, renewable energy and prolonging human life. There is another set of people who try to make use of existing technologies in innovative ways that are also economically feasible, and they earn a bundle of money doing so. They are startup entrepreneurs.
The Internet and advances in information technology have lowered the costs of creating startups significantly. A more accurate way of saying it is that the Internet and technology have created newer vistas for startups that require minimal costs. New ideas are now pervading the market and creating options for the customer.
The most ubiquitous of these ideas are smart phone applications. The startup industry reinvented itself to cash in on the Internet bubble. Startups now are service-oriented and not sale-oriented. Mobile applications are the first natural option for a service.
Uber is an elegant idea: On-demand taxi service. Uber has Android, Windows Phone, iPhone and Blackberry applications. Customers can get a taxi instantly by requesting one right from their phone. The application provides various options from economy to Uber luxurious cars. With dedicated customer service and Uber-certified drivers, Uber succeeds at creating a win-win scenario for both riders and drivers. Uber is now available in 18 countries. A service that helps riders get drivers—sleek.
Another application, Breather, is the brainchild of public speaker and blogger Julien Smith. Smith says he’s obsessed with private customizations. He found getting some private space in the crowded streets of New York too cumbersome. This problem led to a partnership with real estate agents and an application that can help customers get some private space on an hourly basis. On-demand real estate—snazzy.
These are called disruptive applications—they disrupt the usual flow of existing service to provide cheaper, faster, tech-savvy alternatives. Service through smart phone applications has become a reality.
Y Combinator, a startup school in Mountain View, Calif., churns out intelligent, successful startups consistently every three months. After a preliminary demo, founders are invited to spend three months at Y Combinator and given $80,000 as seed money along with startup help, like establishing a network and initial setup. Paul Graham and Robert Morris (computer science geeks might know him as the father of the Morris Internet worm) founded Y Combinator along with a few other people. Y Combinator has churned out successful startups like Reddit, Dropbox, Codecademy and Heroku.
There is something more that these technology startups have done: They have successfully bridged the gap between technology and day-to-day life. Providing robust and reliable services has been the major turnaround.
Take Airbnb, another pupil of Y Combinator, for example. Airbnb, short for air, bed and breakfast, provides a link between travelers and short-time hotels or hostels. Customers who have apartments or rooms available can rent them out to Airbnb’s visiting customers. Again, this is a service that bridges consumers and producers.
Out of all these, the most exciting ones are those who reinvented the way payments are made for these services. Paypal and Bitcoin come to mind. Paypal revolutionized payments for small-, mid- and high-end enterprise services alike by acting as the middleman and hiding the banking details of customers from merchants. Bitcoin has turned e-money into reality.
As much as I admire these entrepreneurs, there is another entrepreneur who is more innovative than any other I have seen. Elon Musk, who recently proposed the invention of the Hyperloop, asks todays entrepreneurs to look beyond the Internet. According to him, there is potential in other real, physical markets for such enterprises. Any buyers want to make a space travel service?
