Rise of the Rest: How Entrepreneurs in Surprising Places Are Building the New American Dream
Steve Case
Avid Reader Press/An Imprint of Simon & Schuster (September 2022)
“Vision without execution is hallucination.” Thomas Edison
To what does the title of this book refer? As Scott Case explains, he launched Rise of the Rest in 2014. It was “an initiative at my investment firm Revolution, designed to promote regional entrepreneurship — helping startups emerge and scale throughout the country…I wanted to make it easier for the next generation of entrepreneurs to found companies in places like DC, or anywhere else in the nation they happened to be.”
Consider these statistics provided by Maija Palmer:
o Ninety percent of new startups fail.
o Seventy-five percent of venture-backed startups fail.
o Less than 50 percent of businesses make it to their fifth year
o Thirty-three percent of startups make it to the ten-year mark.
o Only 40 percent of startups actually turn a profit.
o Eighty-two percent of businesses that fail do so because of cash flow problems, which means they did not find product-market fast enough.
o The highest failure rate occurs in the information industry (63 percent)
The second edition of an earlier Case book, The Third Wave, includes a new chapter with an agenda to “R.E.S.T.A.R.T. America.” That is, a seven-part list of specific ideas to harness the power of technology and innovation to seize the future. This new material was created in January, 2017.
It was Alvin Toffler who introduced the concept of multiple “waves” of socioeconomic development in his classic work, The Third Wave (published, coincidentally and appropriately, in 1984). Briefly, Case describes a relevant process:
o The First Wave (1985-1999) is the settled agricultural society that prevailed in much of the world after the Neolithic Revolution, which replaced hunter-gatherer cultures.
o The Second Wave (2000-2015) is Industrial Age society. The Second Wave began in Western Europe with the Industrial Revolution, and subsequently spread across the world. Key aspects of Second Wave society are the nuclear family, a factory-type education system and the corporation.
Case observes:
“The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.”
o The Third Wave (2016-) is the post-industrial society. Toffler says that since the late 1950s most countries have been transitioning from a Second Wave society into a Third Wave society. He coined many words to describe it and mentions names invented by others, such as the Information Age.
This book is a must-read “for entrepreneurs to help shape their dreams and for corporate titans to help temper their nightmares.” In certain significant respects, this is a prominent entrepreneur’s reflections on the past in combination with his vision of the future but it is also a remarkably objective discussion of how best to cope with a global community that seems to become more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous each day.
Here’s the list of Case’s specific ideas to harness the power of technology and innovation to seize the future:
REFORM the way Washington works with startups
EDUCATE for the Third Wave
SOURCE goods and services from startups
TAX INCENTIVES for regional startups
ATTRACT and retain talent
RETHINK capitalism and entrepreneurialism
TRANSFORM local ecosystems
Case discusses each initiative in his Epilogue (Pages 214-230) “American entrepreneurship is at a crossroads. We are a pivotal “go left” or “go right” moment in our nation’s history. There are many questions we must answer.”
I agree while wondering if we know the right questions to ask. As I re-read the first edition and then the new material in the expanded edition of The Third Wave, I was again reminded of an incident many years ago when one of Albert Einstein’s faculty colleagues at Princeton gently chided him because he always asked the same questions on his final examinations. “Quite true. Guilty as charged. Each year the answers are different.” The same is true when offering products and services that will create or increase demand.
In this context, I am again reminded of an observation by Toffler in his classic, Future Shock (1970): “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
In The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Start-Up Speed (Harvard Business Review Press, October 2022), Linda Yates asserts that larger companies “have the ideas, talent, core competencies, capabilities, assets, channels, and customers to drive meaningful growth. Period.” Here is a “Top 10” list of corporate venture capital (CVC) funds:
1. Google Ventures
2. Intel Capital
3. Qualcomm Ventures
4. Salesforce Ventures
5. Novartis Venture Fund
6. Johnson & Johnson Innovation
7. Samsung Venture Investment
8. Cisco Investments
9. Comcast Ventures
10. SR One
There is much of value to be learned from the successes and (especially) from the failures of ventures launched by multibillion-dollar corporations.
Steve Case’s latest book clearly demonstrates that he is a visionary pragmatist among the world’s greatest thought leaders, one who continues to have a wide and deep impact on those who are determined to make the New American Dream become a reality.
Bravo!