Working with startups, I have come to understand that there is no such thing as the “right path”. What there is, however, is the strategy of your choice to create an environment that makes success more likely. The search for the next big thing in tech follows the same logic — we cannot determine what it will be, despite the endless articles, VC memos, LinkedIn posts, and tweets that make it sound like we can. However, we can increase our chances of being in the right place at the right time, and therefore catch this next big thing and develop it, by focusing on three levers: (i) enabling technologies, (ii) big and relevant problems, and (iii) the right people.

Enabling Technologies (What is just now possible)

Through his books and in this article, Marty Cagan talks about the 4 product risks, with feasibility being one of them. Engineers are pretty familiar with this one, it refers to the “Can we actually build this?” risk. Or, in a fancier way: “whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills and technology we have”.

Breakthroughs in what is feasible have shaped the economy as we know it. Mobile enabled Uber, iFood, Instagram, NuBank, Revolut, just to mention a few. The same happened with Cloud Computing enabling the whole SaaS market and with examples like Salesforce, Spotify and GitHub. Even the API, a very simple technology, started the API-first movement that gave birth to iconic companies such as Stripe. The list goes further, with blockchain enabling Coinbase, Binance, and the whole crypto market.

More recently, the AI and agentic systems breakthroughs are already carving out their spaces in this list. The new thesis of Service as a Software through agent-based systems is already a major discussion, since this tech is stretching the frontier of what is just now possible. We could be pivoting from a sales team using Salesforce and filling a CRM to a team powered by agentic systems working as SDRs and positioned at the core of relevant data sources for strategic context such as online meetings, e-mail threads etc. (Worth reading Foundation Capital articles 1 and 2 on the Agent Economy.). What is just now possible is very commonly an aspect that allows startups to win over incumbents.

Who knows what else we are ignoring and it is happening as of now? What might appear in the next 5 or so years, with the advancement of quantum computing, if Moore’s Law keeps doing its job, and breakthroughs in energy storage and production or even in the way models are trained enable the evolution of these technologies?

But let’s get out of the startup world for a while just to make a point. The steam engine was also a breakthrough in what was feasible at the time, and new businesses were created, people got rich and customers got served better. Also, what is just now possible can be approached in terms of new business models, not necessarily a new tech as usually defined, but a new way of charging, distributing the product or serving customers.

So the first principle here (and also the reason why it is a good idea to bring engineers to product discussions) is to be really curious about what is just now possible, the new tech. Not only when it makes the headlines of the local newspapers or when your favorite lifestyle influencer is talking about it, but instead when there’s only a weird guy commenting on it on X or a random researcher is publishing an obscure paper about it on arXiv.

Big/Relevant problems (What is now needed — and just now tolerated)

I will not dive deeper into the importance of finding a real problem, with customers willing to pay, and representing a reasonable addressable market. That’s very important, there is no business without it, but there are also plenty of other resources on the topic, and as we are talking about the future and the next big things, timing and cultural changes are more of an interesting topic to discuss.

VC track companies work on the edge of behavioral change. The product team building that startup wants the world to do something differently, hopefully easier and in a more cost-effective way. However, that’s not always accepted, at least not at first. Timing is important, that’s why the problem needs to be not just big, but relevant, meaning not only a true pain for the customer, but also a pain that needs solving now, with a solution that is just now accepted by them as tolerable at least.

There is an interesting Ted Talk I remember watching a few years ago in which Derek Thompsom, an american journalist, talks about the concept of MAYA, coined by Raymond Loewy, the father of Industrial Design, that stands for “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”. The idea behind the concept is simple, a great innovator must balance the novelty of what is just now possible, delivering the new capabilities and making the product perceived as cutting-edge, but paying close attention to the need for familiarity that otherwise ignored, it risks making the product off-putting to the customer. We have plenty of examples of successful products nowadays that were launched years ago by other companies without achieving the same success, or products that turned out to be mere sci-fi or Black Mirror-esque performances, and we can trace their failure to timing issues.

The main point is that we love familiarity, but people differ in many aspects, risk-aversion included. That’s why a seed startup trying to reach early adopters is facing a completely different challenge than a more mature company trying to sell to the late majority. From the offer to the whole go-to-market strategy the approach may differ. The existence of the dilemma between the novelty of what is just now possible and the craving for familiarity in our risk-averse natures is self-evident. What is not self-evident, though, is where to draw the line between which theses are at the right timing for market distribution and which ones are not, that is really foggy. The challenge is how a new company can engineer, as Loewy would say, a familiar surprise, by balancing our human neophilia (love of the new) with our neophobia (fear of the new).

That’s why I am a believer of the product discovery techniques (worth a mention to Teresa Torres book on the topic — Continuous Discovery Habits) and the design tools that enable the understanding of the person buying from the startup. The next big thing, more than the tech breakthrough that enables it, lies in the cultural and behavioral change that sparks inside those customers.

The right people (Being resourceful and cutting through the chaos)

They will show you the new tech they learned on a random subreddit. They will talk to you about a very specific problem that every company in sector Z is facing in a specific department. They will share with you a new foundation model that a guy in Pakistan just announced in a tweet on X. They will assure you that a macro trend reported in the news is not another BS headline, helping you to distinguish between signal and noise. They will mentor you during hard times, when everything feels foggy. They may join your founding team. Ultimately, they may also invest in you. Those are the right people.

Truth is that, despite your knowledge of the latest tech or your understanding of a problem/market, the only people capable of capitalizing on those big breakthroughs will be the resourceful. And by resourceful I don’t mean the ones with more funds raised, that’s important too, but I mean the ones with access to talent, mentors and clients to get these theses out. Those people will make the idea a reality, and you should be close to them, and earn their trust, in order to be dangerous in any way.

The best way to meet those people? Be one of them. Insanely curious about the new enabling technologies, aware of relevant problems and able to discuss in depth what might be the next big thing. Keep moving. Move with them. You might bump into each other in a random thread on social media, or at late coding sessions by the college library — who knows?

Finally, it is worth noting that the title of this article should use the plural, as we are in the search for the next big thingS. It reflects too limited a mindset to think otherwise. Every major disruption in the tech scene opened space for several businesses and different theses as we previously discussed. Also, it is important to note that problems come from customers and stakeholders, but the best solutions are the byproduct of strong product teams and relentless founders using those problems and customer desires as inputs and connecting them to the cutting-edge of enabling tech, meaning that the next big things are more like a blank canvas of opportunity, taking on the colors painted by the team carving out its space.

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