How do you do market validation when the customers are stuck in 2020 and you are building for 2030?

One methodology guided founders for fifty years: talk to the customers in the market, learn their problems, build a solution for what is missing. But now? It is no longer enough. Whenever the world is in the eye of an industrial revolution, customers live in the past, and founders need to live in the future.

We live in a strange period, like the seventies, when customers wanted more sophisticated pocket calculators while founders were building Oracle, Microsoft and Apple. Customer feedback today? Very important, but it does not necessarily lead you in the right direction.

This is a time for founders with vision. The ones who can describe the future in HD as if they just came back from there, and at the same time keep their feet on the ground, with deep market understanding and a bold opinion on what the next step of the evolution looks like.

If you are building a company that defines the future of your industry in HD, I would love to hear. And if you happen to be building a time machine, I would love to join the beta.