Almost all fortunes are amassed on use of
some sort of free resources that comes in abundance and low cost, sometimes zero.
Let us take a look at some examples:
1.Slaves were disposable, they
work around the clock and they don’t require benefits, they don’t rest on
weekends, they don’t have medical plan, they eat cheapest food and they work
until they die. They are responsible for rises of many historical empires, the
latest example were the European empires thrived on slave trading that crossed
the Atlantic Ocean, connecting Spain/Great Britain/Holland, Africa and Caribbean
islands plantations, while creating huge amount of wealth for the European nations
so people can have sugar while sipped their daily dose of coffee. It was a sad story
for the slaves, of course, but it was good news for the Europeans.
2.Coal is responsible for the rise
of British Empire with a breakthrough invention, steam engine; no longer did
people rely on horsepower to drive the carriage and economy. The economy and
steam engine powered trains travel and businesses times faster than the horse
powered transportations and factories. It made the Great Britain Great.
3.People. Back from 1980 until
2010, the cheap labor had helped China rose again to be one the largest economy
in the planet. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers work side by side in
sweat shops sewing Nike shoes, assembly iPhones with salaries that no American
or European workers would accept. The result is rise of China at the cost of
generation of Chinese workers. It was sad but it ends up a success story of
China as a nation.
4.The Web, back in 1994-2000, when
Sir Tim Burners-Lee invented WorldWebWeb and made it open to the world and nobody
owns the Web, which anyone can use to build a website on it. It has triggered
the first web boom, or dotcom bubble as people called it today. Every developer
who knows a bit of HTML can build a FrontPage/website and provide with some
sort of service, worldwide. The result is the rise of Web 1.0 companies,
including Yahoo, Google and Facebook, Craigslist, Flickr and millions of others.
It all started with the decision of Tim Burners-Lee to make the web open and
free.
5.Appstore/Google Play Store, in
2007 at San Francisco’s Moscone Centre, Steve Jobs flipped out a polished
device that he affectionately dubbed as iPhone, one year later, Apple announced
iTunes/Appstore so developers can build software that Apple called “Apps” to
fill in the void. But the early stage Appstore was an empty place with only a
handful of software that Steve Jobs handpicked from Google, Yahoo and AOL to
demonstrate to iPhone users ho useful it was and try to lure developers to
build “apps” for this new shiny device even more useful. The early bird thrived
with the free resources, the emptiness of the Appstore. The same thing happened
later with Google Android Market; the free space sucked in any goodies/trash
that happened to be there and were pushed to millions of hungry, curious smart
phone users, whom would try anything.
6.Today, the new free and cheap
as dirty resources becomes free Public Space on China cities streets such as
Beijing and Shanghai, Mobike and OFO, the “bike sharing unicorn”, are make
advantage of this new free resources. The space was built at expense of
taxpayers but neither Mobike nor Ofo needs to pay for it to pile up with
hundreds thousands of bikes to capture a pie of this new market. They are
already big successes and doomed to be the next BAT companies before most people
have realized that. There is an argument that said the business is not
reasonable to rent bikes for a minimal 50 cent to 1 kuai per hour with hundred
thousand of USD cash burning, but they forget one thing, actually Mobike/OFO
don’t care about your 1 kuai, they care about your deposit money of 99 and 299
kuai, they don’t even care about the deposit money, they care about your personal
data tied up with your Alipay or credit card, how big will they become if they
later decide to replace cheap bikes with self driving autonomous vehicles?
If you are an entrepreneur too, the big
question is to find out the next free abundantly available resources that you
can use, or abuse, to establish some business. The burning question is, what is
the next thing that comes in abundance and free?
AI? Robotics that work like slaves?
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