Quick Thoughts: Why theme based Startup Innovation works.

When I started at Anthemis, I was worried that being constrained by the Financial Services sector would make it difficult to come up with ideas for startups.

But that misses the point: in addition to an idea, you need to know whether an idea is valuable by knowing if it’s been tried before, is being tried by someone else and whether it is succeeding or not.

In the early days of the web, it was possible to know most of what was going on in the Internet, much like a scientist in the mid 19th Century could understand most fields and be a generalist ‘Natural Philosopher’.

The Internet is now like science after the Industrial Revolution, it’s impossible to know everything that’s going on — so we have to become domain experts like physicists and biologists before.