The Result: Frontier Tech Comeback

Made-in-Germany flying cars are coming and with 90m$ in their pockets :)

If the “easier” things are too competitive, then what’s left?

The hard things!

Luckily, founders looking for hard business problems to solve will not be out of business any time soon. Many things are still very hard to do:

On the one hand, even in SaaS or Mobile, finding product-market fit with a minimal amount of resources and in the fastest time is still hard today! But after finding PMF, other topics such as marketing or sales are slightly easier thanks to many playbooks and experienced people out there that you can hire.

On the other hand, there’s a group of new, complex technologies, in its early stages. These technologies are not so well understood and they carry a higher degree of uncertainty, but they have enormous potential to impact the world — and, to be honest, they also call the inner geek in most of us!

For those companies, there are no playbooks, and it’s very hard to group them into homogeneous categories because technologies and the state of the art evolves. What had a high degree of technology risk yesterday, may be easy today. What was a “hard tech” startup yesterday, may well be just a regular one tomorrow.

But today, if we look at areas where the underlying technology has been “democratized” (so it’s accessible to more founders), four areas are commonly considered “frontier tech”:

Artificial Intelligence software

Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain

IoT, Hardware and Drones

Artificial, Augmented and Virtual reality

There are also other areas in which very complex technology is evolving quickly towards its democratization. The following seven areas are among the candidates for the new frontiers of tech:

Bioinformatics

Space

Energy

Robotics

Unmanned vehicles

Farming

Quantum computing

It’s also worth mentioning that Developer tools and Infrastructure, Security software, and Fintech — not financial services — are not considered frontier tech. But they usually (1) require a high degree of specialisation and (2) tend to be built on the latest technology advancements.