Taleb and Staying Power

In Taleb’s Antifrgaile, he shares a concept called the “Lindy Effect”. Simply, something that’s been time tested for x many years will last another x many years. For example….the fork has been around for some 3,000 years and it’ll probably last another 3,000 years.

The model can be applied for books too. If a book has lasted 20 years and is still widely read…then it will probably be relevant for another 20 years. Which is exactly why I’ll avoid any recent bestsellers. Most lack substance and address trendy topics of the year.

In one of his talks, Taleb points out the evolution of computers. We went from mainframes -> PC -> laptops -> smartphone/tablets….and when have people held tablets on their hand to write stuff on? Oh yeah, I remember seeing that during Ancient Greek times. I’m sure it’s been around even earlier.

Is that something that should be used as a test for staying power?

If a technology that’s been around for 20 years just disappeared….would life continue as normal? I think it would if it’s not a new behaviour shaped by technology.

There is no denying that smartphones changed a lot of human behaviour. This instantaneous access through mobile devices to everything. You wait…you are not doing something that requires even a little bit of focus…and you are instantly looking at your smartphone. Now, with Face ID you can’t even stop yourself before the thing unlocks.

But what about food delivery? That’s not new. My parents had food delivery as a norm even before I was born. Heck, traders had their own food delivery app for a long time….it was called the trading assistant. You could spot them in financial district because you’d see a young guy decked in a suit but carrying massive bags of to-go boxes on each hand during lunch hours.

This probably makes aggregation of services weak in staying power when compared to a SaaS platform that lets you run your entire business on it. That’s probably what will give companies like Automattic and Shopify staying power. Many businesses can’t exist without it.

So, does that mean for a company to be valuable long into the future that its services/products have to create a new behavioural shift that wasn’t around decades ago? Or, is it that the service/product should continue to provide greater convenience at a lower cost for something that is engrained in us?

The latter being something like making car rides cheaper and easier….buying books cheaper and faster….making travel lodging easier, cheaper etc…..

If I think about the Lindy Effect, then improving on the habits that are engrained in our lives from hundreds of years ago would have greater staying power given old such behaviours are. Naturally, people like better, cheaper, faster. Exactly what Amazon’s e-commerce business does.

But when you introduce a new behaviour…it doesn’t have to reach the point of “better, faster, cheaper” yet. It’ll probably go through the full cycle of “expensive and available to few” until Moore’s law reduces costs rapidly for it. A product that introduces a new behaviour may take longer and might not have staying power if the behaviour isn’t obvious to the masses.

Hmm.. Shopify makes opening an online store: cheaper, faster, better….for the first time entrepreneur. Using Squarespace/Wix..it isn’t cheaper but it’s easier and faster to set up a website. I guess one can say website builders are the Amazonification of a new behaviour of being online and building a personal brand.

Maybe this is the natural evolution. The first test being whether the behaviour is an old one that can be made cheaper, easier, better, faster…. And then the second test being whether the product may introduce a completely new set of behaviours. But I’m now thinking the second may not lead to creating massive companies. Rather, it’s got to be making the newest foundational behaviour (something made habitual in the last decade) to be cheaper, faster etc…