If you’re reading this, you likely have some form of interest in startups and entrepreneurship. But then again, who doesn’t? Work with like-minded people, do stuff you actually care about, be yourself, and possibly make a great living doing it? Who wouldn’t sign up for that?

This sort of thinking seems to be prevailing at an ever-growing rate, all over the world, as the ‘startup’ phenomenon continues to gain steam. Industry after industry, service after service is being challenged by groups of hardworking, motivated and optimistic people, who want to see things done differently. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s toilet seats or rocket ships, the ethos of ‘Dream it, do it.’ seems to hold great appeal.

And so it should. It’s easy to imagine a not-too-distant future where what we now call ‘startups’, simply become the new norm of how people engage the world to create value. So ubiquitous may be this mindset, and so accessible the tools needed to engage it, we do indeed seem to be at the beginning of what will be looked back upon as a time of major change for how people worked, and what they worked on.

I’m often told I exaggerate this point, but how can you not get excited by the emergence of a group of people who see problems, and rather than complaining, marching, blogging or whatever else people do, actually just get to work building a solution?! Buckminster Fuller sums this up perfectly:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”