8 Visionaries on How They Spot the Future

Paul Saffo

A longtime technology forecaster, Saffo is a managing director at the Silicon Valley investment research firm Discern. Formerly the director of the Institute for the Future, he is also a consulting professor in Stanford University’s engineering department.
There are four indicators I look for: contradictions, inversions, oddities, and coincidences. In 2007 stock prices and gold prices were both soaring. Usually you don’t see those prices high at the same time. When you see a contradiction like that, it means more fundamental change is ahead.
The second indicator is an inversion, where you see something that’s out of place. When the Mexican police captured the head of a drug cartel, in the photos the perpetrators were looking proudly at the camera while the cops were wearing ski masks. Usually it’s the reverse. To me that was an indicator that Mexico was very far from winning its war against the cartels.
Then there are oddities. When the Roomba robot vacuum was introduced in 2002, all the engineers I know were very excited, and I don’t recall them owning vacuums. I said, this is damn strange. This is not about cleaning floors, this is about scratching some kind of itch. It’s about something happening with robots.
Finally, there are coincidences. At the fourth Darpa Grand Challenge in 2007, a bunch of robots successfully drove in a simulated suburb. The same day, there was a 118-car pileup on a California highway. We had robots that understand the California vehicle code better than humans, and a bunch of humans crashing into each other. That said to me, really, people shouldn’t drive.

Esther Dyson

Founder of the influential Release 1.0 newsletter and PC Forum conference director, Dyson is an angel investor in technology, health care, and space travel companies. She sits on the boards of 23andMe, the Long Now Foundation, the Santa Fe Institute, and Evernote, among others.
The first thing I do is go where other people aren’t. I leave Silicon Valley and spend a lot of time not just in New York but in Russia and in other far-off places. Any time you approach something as an outsider, you’re able to see what people who are familiar with it can’t. I love traveling because I love seeing how many different ways there are to do things.
The other thing is to be curious. My parents are both scientists, so I learned to ask "Why, why, why?" Mostly I look at what I’m interested in, and that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s what the world will find interesting. I can be self-indulgent.

Juan Enriquez

Enriquez is managing director at Excel Medical Ventures and chair and CEO of Biotechonomy, a Boston investment firm. He’s the author of The Untied States of America and As the Future Catches You.
A clear view of the future is often obstructed by taking too much for granted. Like: "We are the human species." Really? It turns out that when you consider Cro-Magnon, Australopithecus, etc., we’ve had 29 upgrades. So unless you believe that the purpose of all of this evolution was to create Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern and then flatline, you have to ask: Is it possible to have another upgrade?
Or what about "In 50 years, the US flag will still have 50 stars"? So why would you assume continuity for the next 50 years? It’s when we question our most cherished assumptions that it gets really interesting to play with this stuff.

Tim O’Reilly

Founder of the eponymous tech book publisher, O’Reilly launched several influential gatherings of the technorati, including Web 2.0, Foo Camp, and Maker Faire.
I don’t really think I spot the future; I spot the things in the present that tell us something about the future. I look for interesting people. I find the cool kids and then say, what are they doing?
The myth of innovation is that it starts with entrepreneurs, but it really starts with people having fun. The Wright brothers weren’t trying to build an airline, they were saying, "Holy shit, do you think we could fly?" The first kids who made snowboards, they just glued skis together and said, "Let’s try this!" With the web, none of us thought there was money in it. People said, "This document came from halfway around the world. How awesome is that!"

Vint Cerf

As a Stanford professor in the 1970s, Cerf co-invented TCP/IP with Bob Kahn. He helped pioneer packet-switching and went on to lead development of email and data infrastructure at MCI. In 2005, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Cerf is now chief Internet evangelist at Google.
I like Alan Kay’s comment "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Sometimes spotting the future is really a question of realizing what’s now possible and actually trying it out. In my case, working with Bob Kahn, what became the Internet was not possible until certain economic conditions were satisfied—equipment had to be affordable, certain kinds of technology had to be readily available. So some things get invented because it is suddenly possible to invent them.

Chris Sacca

A former Googler, tech executive, and venture capital attorney, Sacca invests in early-stage startups through his firm, Lowercase Capital. His portfolio companies include Facebook, Instagram, Posterous, Twitter, and Uber.
How do I spot the future? Two words: flux capacitor. No, really—I think we venture capitalists get too much credit for predicting the future. We can look very prescient when we talk about why we invested in a company, but we’re wrong more than we’re right. It just turns out that when we’re right, we’re really, really right.
It used to be that when you invested in a company, you looked at a business plan. But now we don’t have to invest in ideas anymore; now I invest in live URLs and apps that I can download. Plus, the users do the due diligence for us. I search Twitter to see what actual users are saying about something I want to invest in: Is it buggy? Is it a pain in the ass? Are they evangelizing it? After seeing hundreds of positive mentions of Heroku on Twitter, I was in. Salesforce ended up buying it for $225 million.
Another thing I do: I walk around Best Buy every three to four weeks and watch people. When you do this, you see how normal people make product decisions, what their price breaking points might be. In a world of people who’ve got stock options, there isn’t a difference between a $80 thing and a $110 thing, but for real people working hourly wages, there is a huge difference.

Joi Ito

Ito is director of the MIT Media Lab and the former CEO of Creative Commons. He was an early-stage investor in Flickr, Twitter, and Kickstarter.
I believe in serendipity, and in the strength of weak ties. I connect with people from different fields and different places and always use pattern recognition and peripheral vision to spot opportunities in unlikely places.
Agility is essential. Your ability to respond to a suddenly emerging trend is most important. During the financial crisis, the companies that were successful were prepared for anything. Most of the people had prepared for the wrong things. By being agile and having your antennas out, you can react when you see the trend starting, rather than relying on these multiyear, multimillion-dollar analyses on the future of X. Instead of being a futurist, you want to be a nowist.

Peter Schwartz

A cofounder of Global Business Network and a senior vice president at Salesforce.com, Schwartz is an expert in scenario planning and the author of several books, including The Art of the Long View and The Long Boom.
You look for technologies that are likely to create major inflection points—breaks in a trend, things that are going to accelerate. Those tend to be very powerful. This is especially true with scientific technology and tools. For example, we are seeing the speed and cost of DNA testing falling dramatically—there’s now a $1,000 DNA tester. That’s clearly going to create an inflection point in the health care curve.
Another way to anticipate change is to watch where scientific talent is heading. Science advances in part by attracting talented people. So if an area is attracting great talent and money from governments and companies, you can expect to see important change.