Spotting a RocketShip When It Does Not Look Like One

For the uninitiated, rocketship companies are the Googles, Facebooks, Ubers and Salesforces of the world that take advantage of massive market transitions to build very large companies. Rocketships grow rapidly from zero to billions in users, revenues, and valuation in relatively short periods of time.

Rocketships grow at a scorching pace by fundamentally transforming the experience and economics for both the user and the buyer. They help the“job to be done” get done in a new way that is faster, smarter, better by an order of magnitude.

And in doing so, they massively redistribute customer spending from the old to the new. Think of shifting CIO budgets from on-premise to cloud, the migration of advertising spend from old media to search and social, or the movement of transportation spend to Uber, Lyft, Ola and the like.

Rocketships are hard to recognize in the early days. They usually look like crazy or even bad ideas with a very niche following.

So, what is required to recognize a rocketship way before it becomes patently obvious? 

Not only is that pretty damn hard, but it is also against natural human instinct. The biggest hurdles are hubris, the ego’s presumption of knowledge, and the need for social validation. 

Human beings are predisposed to judge based on past experience and are colored by memory and what others think. It is against the natural grain of human thought to see what something can be irrespective of what it currently is and the odds against.

To find new and hidden patterns, and to see the end-game when there are no precedents, we need to listen without prejudice and learn to evaluate opportunities with an open and blank mind.

It is only when we seek to understand the most basic needs & motivations of users — and of the human being behind the user — and the jobs they need to get done that we can begin to figure out how they can be better served, 

The more open, curious and wondrous we become in engaging with what we see and hear, higher the possibilities for your intuition to connect the dots, perceive impending market transitions, and recognize the big ideas that can change the world.

Being non-conformist and right requires less arrogance, more reflection, and deeper empathy. The ability to reason from first principles without emotion or preconception flows from this state of mind that is deeply aware of its own conditioning.

Rocketships create wealth, inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs and change the lives of their employees, investors, users, and customers in very tangible and real ways. Learning to be more conscious of how rocketship companies begin, morph and evolve can help you spot one, be a part of one, or even create one.