“To get great again, we need to recreate what made us great.” -Peter Schiff
How we built our previous success won’t necessarily work to rebuild but can inform us and give us insights for the next iteration of ourselves.
The skills and plans of building a viable dot com in the late 1990s obviously are not completely transferable to today because of new technologies, different financial expectations, and changing consumer demands. But the mental framework of asking questions to innovate are still useful.
The entrepreneurial idea of “solve problems in a more efficient manner that people will pay for” was successful two hundred years ago and will likely be so two centuries hence. The problems will evolve, the approaches to develop and deliver solutions will change, and the economics and payment systems will constantly upgrade. But in the end the willingness to look at shortfalls, creatively address them, build ways to solve them, and do the hard work with delayed gratification to reach broad adoption have worked to build companies and countries and will always be relevant.