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That was then.

Today linear organizations are at dire risk from the Six Ds, but exponential entrepreneurs have never had it so good. Today the shift from “I've got a neat idea” to “I run a billion-dollar company” is occurring faster than ever.

This is possible, in part, because the structure of exponential organizations is very different. Rather than utilize armies of employees or large physical plants, twenty-first-century start-ups are smaller organizations focused on information technologies, dematerializing the once physical and creating new products and revenue streams in months, sometimes weeks. As a result, these lean start-ups are the small furry mammals competing with the large dinosaurs—meaning they're one asteroid strike away from world dominance.

Exponential technology is that asteroid.

In times of dramatic change, the large and slow cannot compete with the small and nimble. But being small and nimble requires a whole lot more than just understanding the Six Ds of exponentials and their expanding scale of impact. You'll also need to understand the technologies and tools driving this change. These include exponential technologies like infinite computing, sensors and networks,
3-D printing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and synthetic biology and exponential organizational tools such as crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, incentive competitions, and the potency of a properly built community. These exponential advantages empower entrepreneurs like never before.

Welcome to the age of exponentials.

In his book
The Prime Movers
,
¹
psychologist Edwin Locke identifies the core mental traits of great business leaders—Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Walt Disney, and J. P. Morgan, to name only a few. While a number of variables contributed to their success, Locke found one key trait they all shared: vision.

“It's the ability to see ahead that truly set each of these men apart,” says Locke.
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“The data shows that companies consistently fail when they rest on their laurels and think that what worked yesterday will work today or tomorrow. Great leaders all have the ability to see farther and the confidence to drag their organizations toward that vision. Look at Steve Jobs. He wasn't very nice about it, but if you told Jobs something was impossible, all he would do was disagree and walk away. He had no time for impossible. He had a vision of the future
and would not be swayed.”

Thus the goal of this chapter and the next is to give you exactly what these great leaders had: the vision not to be swayed. This means giving you a much firmer sense of the future, and this requires a three-step process. First, in the next section, we're going to revisit the deceptive nature of exponentials and point out a few indicators that typically mark the transition from deceptive to disruptive—which is exactly when entrepreneurs need to insert themselves into the equation. Next, we're going to see how all this plays out in the real world, drilling down into the past, present, and future of 3-D printing—a technology currently transitioning from deceptive to disruptive and ripe with possibility. To explore these possibilities, we'll meet a visionary leader in the field and a couple of entrepreneurs perhaps not unlike yourself, folks who had little knowledge of this technology yet still figured out a way to harness its power and start companies very capable of causing billon-dollar disruptions.

Then, in the next chapter, we'll block out a few more exponentially advancing technologies, seeing the future potential for networks and sensors, infinite computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and synthetic biology. While these technologies are already producing disruptive growth and have begun transforming our world, the “expert only” nature of their interfaces (more on this in a moment) and their stratospheric price tags have kept them primarily in the hands of billion-dollar companies (think Google's use of artificial intelligence or Tesla Motors's use of robotics). But not for long. Decreasing prices, increasing performance, and the development of far friendlier user interfaces are making these platforms available to those with a clear vision of where they want to go. Thus each of these technologies hover on the verge of widespread adoption, and for those exponential entrepreneurs able to stay ahead of this curve, the opportunities are considerable.

If we want to stay ahead of this curve, it helps to understand a little more about the nature of exponential deception. That starts with understanding the powerful biases that inform the Gartner Hype Cycle (see below).

After a novel technology is introduced and begins gaining momentum, we tend to envision it in its final form—seriously overinflating our expectations for both its developmental timetable and its short-term potential. Invariably, when these technologies fail to live up to the initial hype—usually in that gap between deception and disruption on our list of the Six Ds—public sentiment for the technology falls into the trough of disillusionment. And this is where a great many of the technologies discussed in chapter 3 now sit. But when technologies are in the trough, we are again swayed by the hype (this time, the negative hype) and consistently fail to believe they'll ever emerge, thus missing their massively transformative potential.

Gartner Hype Circle

Source:
www.gartner.com

Take the personal computer. Back in the late 1960s, when folks like writer Stewart Brand (who coined the term
personal computer
) first started discussing the idea of the PC, it was with an incredible amount of “change the world” fervor.
³
Then the machines actually arrived, and all most people could do was play Pong. This was the trough of disillusionment, cultural deception at its finest. But imagine being able to take your knowledge of what computers can do today back to the early 1980s—what bold entrepreneurial business opportunities might this have unlocked for you?

Hype Cycle Indicators

Gartner Hype Cycle Indicators

Source:
www.gartner.com

Recognizing when a technology is exiting the trough of disillusionment and beginning to rise up the slope of enlightenment is critical for entrepreneurs. Reading an exponential curve like a road map, experts watch for a number of indicators—the development of best practices, supplier proliferation, secondary financings, among others. But for me, the most important telltale factor is the development of a simple and elegant user interface—a gateway of effortless interaction
that plucks a technology from the hands of the geeks and deposits it with the entrepreneurs. In fact, it was exactly this kind of interface that transformed the Internet.

The Internet was born of frustration. In the early 1960s, researchers were titillated by computational possibility yet stymied by geography. Back then, there were only a few major computing centers on the planet. All those researchers who didn't happen to work at MIT or Caltech—well, they were just out of luck. Then, in April 1963, a computer scientist named J. C. R. Licklider wrote a memo to his colleagues proposing an “Intergalactic Computer Network”—a network that replaced traditional circuit-switching technology with the then new development of packet switching, allowing any researcher with a terminal and a phone line to connect to one of the computing centers they so desperately needed.
⁴
This was the birth of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the foundational network that has since become today's Internet.

ARPANET became operational in 1975. It was mostly text-based, fairly complicated to navigate, and used primarily by scientists. All of this changed in 1993, when Marc Andreessen, a twenty-two-year-old undergraduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, coauthored Mosaic—both the very first web browser and the Internet's first user-friendly user interface.
⁵
Mosaic unlocked the Internet. By adding in graphics and replacing Unix with Windows—the operating system that was then running nearly 80 percent of the computers in the world—Andreessen mainstreamed a technology developed for scientists, engineers, and the military. As a result, a worldwide grand total of twenty-six websites in early 1993 mushroomed into more than 10,000 sites by August 1995, then exploded into several million by the end of 1998.
⁶

Industries Being Disrupted by 3-D Printing

Sources: Deloitte analysis; CSC, 3D printing and the future of manufacturing, 2012

Graphic: Deloitte University Press |
DUPress.com

This is the power of an elegant and robust user interface. It's also a sign that it's time for an exponential entrepreneur to get in the game. Certainly, deciding when a technology is ripe for entrepreneurial development is not too different from a venture capitalist deciding a technology is ripe for investment. Yet venture capitalists have dozens and dozens of theories about when a technology is actually ripe for investment, so why have I chosen this one indicator above all others? Simple. The creation of a simple and elegant user interface gives entrepreneurs the ability to harness this new tool to solve problems, start businesses, and most importantly, experiment. Think of the explosion of apps that followed Apple's creation of the App Store. As new entrepreneurs are constantly improving this new interface, they are also further enabling new entrepreneurs—meaning a positive feedback loop of increasing interface innovation develops. It's a virtuous cycle seen over
and over again.

More exciting, it's exactly these kinds of robust, elegant interfaces that are beginning to show up in half a dozen exponential technologies—meaning there are literally a half dozen Internet-sized opportunities becoming available to the clued-in entrepreneur.

One such opportunity lies with 3-D printing, a technology now emerging from a thirty-year period of deceptive growth and beginning to disrupt a portion of the $10 trillion global manufacturing industry.
⁷
In the rest of this chapter, we're going to explore this technology's past, present, and future and then acquaint you with a few entrepreneurs pioneering that future. The goal here is both to familiarize you with this technology and use it as a real-time template for the Six Ds, exploring how select entrepreneurs have correctly read the cycle of hype and positioned themselves to take full advantage of this tech's exponential opportunity.

To accomplish this goal, we need to start at the beginning. So let's crank up the wayback machine and take a trip some 2.6 million years into our past, to what is now Southern Ethiopia, where one of our craftier ancestors picked up a pair of rocks and used one to chip away at the other until all that remained of the second was a sharp stone flake.
⁸
Eureka!