More Pain Killers, Less Vitamins

This week alone, three different people have told me "the industry we're trying to disrupt is the last frontier for innovation." And then, after hearing more about their company, idea, and solution, I end up feeling bad for the reputation that it appears the word "innovation" has developed. Just because you replicated an offline process online doesn't mean you innovated, it just means we're evolving. "Technology eating the world" is turning out to be really boring. There are incredibly smart and savvy entrepreneurs working on incredibly boring and, when considered in the context of the world as a whole, meaningless ideas.

They're working on vitamins instead of pain killers.

They're working on nice-to-haves that make things a little bit better.

They're not working on the must-haves that changes the entire trajectory of a situation.

People will forget to take their vitamins. But, when suffering, people will always look for a way to kill that pain.