Live in the Future and Notice What's Missing
Don't try to think of a startup idea — get out of the present so ideas find you
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
A practical idea-sourcing method: relocate yourself mentally and socially into a future that already exists somewhere, then notice the unbuilt, missing things. It reframes ideation from brainstorming to observation. Use it when you want a big idea but don't work in a supercomputer lab or have obvious edge access.
Origin
Maples invokes William Gibson ('the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed') and Louis Pasteur ('chance favors the prepared mind'). He argues great founders don't have better binoculars — they build the thing they personally find missing in a future they already inhabit.
Core principles
- 01Only people living in the future have valid opinions about it — otherwise your opinion is 'interesting but irrelevant'
- 02If you're truly in the future there will necessarily be missing, unbuilt things
- 03A prepared mind attracts luck and notices breakthroughs others walk past
How to run it
- 1
Get out of the present, not just the building
Deliberately place yourself where a slice of the future already exists — a more subtle move than the usual 'get out of the building.'
- 2
Sample futures by proximity to future-dwellers
Spend time with people far ahead on some edge of technology or behavior. If you lack access, engineer it.
Pro tip Maddie Hall spent a year as Sam Altman's chief of staff — 'Sam Altman visits the future multiple times a day' — which led her to genetically modified trees at Living Carbon.
- 3
Serve Lighthouse customers
Work with the small set of customers who already live in the future; solving their needs 'takes you to the promised land' because their requirements presage everyone else's.
Pro tip At Silicon Graphics, Maples spent time with Industrial Light & Magic, not normal studios, because their problems predicted everyone's future needs.
Watch out Not all customers are equal — non-innovative customers (e.g. wanting on-prem integration) give requirements that aren't additive to your strategy; their opinion is irrelevant.
- 4
Notice and build what's missing for you
Build the thing you personally wish existed in that future, the way Andreessen built Mosaic to make the internet immediately more useful for himself.
In the wild
Working at Zenith, her early startup ideas (laser tag) were weak. She proactively followed Sam Altman as chief of staff for a year, sampling many futures, saw big carbon-takeout spend converging with maturing genetic engineering, and married the inflections with the need.
→ Founded Living Carbon, doing genetically modified trees — far from her origin.
Andreessen didn't build the Mosaic browser because he saw a market for browsers; he built the thing he wanted to make the internet immediately more useful for himself and his team.
→ His intuition about what to build was strong because he was building what was missing for him.
Common mistakes
Trying to think of a startup idea directly
Maples says this is 'exactly wrong' — you live in the future and notice what's missing, rather than forcing ideation.
Treating all customers as equal
Requirements from customers stuck in the present pull your product backward instead of forward.
Is it for you?
Best for
Aspiring founders and PMs without obvious access to frontier technology or customers
Not ideal for
Teams already deep at a technology frontier who simply need to execute
From the transcript
“the number one thing I like to say is get out of the present”
“if you're living in the future and you notice what's missing your intuition about what to build is far more likely to be right”
“not all customers are equal you want to find customers that live in the future”
From the episode
Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea
Mike Maples, Jr. (Founding Partner at Floodgate, ex-Product