How to Surf on the Ripples of the Pebble Stone: 10 Essential Rules of Being an Exponential Entrepreneur in Exponential Times

‘ ’The ripples of the pebble stone that was thrown into the water in 1989 have spread over a period of 30 years and become a force that affects all layers of society’‘ states Mr. Faruk Eczacıbaşı in his book, “ Daha Yeni Başlıyor” . These ring shaped ripples are nothing but the inevitable transformation waves of the internet and related technologies brought to our society. In the book, it is stressed that we live in a transitional period which the old models that shape the lives of today’s senior generations lose their validity; on top of it, the new models have not yet been taken place. Each and every day, we observe that many systems that were established on strong foundations during the industry era has been questioned and even collapsed by new models. The necessity of change has begun to question our many behaviors that have been embedded to our DNA. In the book, the 3 must have components to develop new models are emphasized: Felixibility; to be prepared for the rapid change coming with exponential development, convergence ; to avoid sticking past patterns of thought and to get rid of silos, networking; to take advantage of the advancing in communication technologies. Utilizing these three dimensions, we will be able to understand the future that is conceived to a great deal of uncertainities, prepare for them, and most importantly have the capability to look at these uncertainities through a different lens and see the big picture. Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns states that once a technology becomes information-enabled (i.e. digital) it rides on the exponential curve of Moore’s Law . Therefore, digital technologies are improving exponentially and becoming accessible to an increasing number of people globally. This enables new ways of thinking and gives rise to new solutions to problems many didn’t even know existed. When “new thinking” makes an industry obsolete, it also eliminates an entire set of problems in a society. This is nothing but the definition of disruption. The exponential disruption affects different layers of our society in different paces and magnitudes. The layers of academy, politics, finance, economy, entrepreneurship, family concept all have their own dimensions and paces of perception and conductivity of this transformation. For example, look at the rate of change how the private companies such as Amazon and Google are managed and scaled, isn’t it unbelievable? As Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest, and Mike Malone have argued in their book ‘ ’Exponential Organizations’’ , that in the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company—the Exponential Organization—that has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology. A CxO can eliminate the incremental, linear way traditional companies get bigger, leveraging assets like community, big data, algorithms, and new technology into achieving performance benchmarks ten times better than its peers. As I have been a technology entrepreneur for the last 6 years, working on digitizing and disrupting energy&utility industry at Reengen , I witnessed enough to elaborate more in entrepreneurship dimension of above phenomenal transformation. I, in my own way, will try to express my impressions on how Silicon Valley responds to these exponential transformation waves in entrepreneurship domain. Couple of years ago, I spent an entire year in Silicon Valley and completed 4-month Graduate Studi…