Keith A. Grossman@KeithGrossman
One of the most useful mental models I have learned came from @chr1sa at the beginning of my career …
Most debates about new technologies are not actually about the technology. They are about the stage people believe it is in.
Every transformative technology passes through four stages:
➡️ Science: Can it exist?
➡️ Technology: Can it work?
➡️ Business: Can it create value?
➡️ Culture: Can it become normal?
But here is the mistake almost everyone makes:
Most people judge every technology by the standards of the next stage, expecting revenue from technologies that are still engineering problems; expecting polished products from scientific breakthroughs; and expecting mass adoption from businesses that are still searching for product-market fit.
The criticism is not necessarily wrong. It is often just early.
This framework does not tell you which technologies will succeed. In fact, most will not. But every technology that changes the world must move through these stages.
The Internet spent decades in research before it became commercial. AI spent decades in research before it became a platform. Today, nobody thinks about the technology underpinning sending a message or writing a post on X. Nobody thinks about satellites before opening Google or Apple Maps.
The greatest technologies become invisible and that is why adoption curves only tell half the story: They tell you how many people have adopted a technology but they do not tell you what must happen before everyone else does.
The biggest opportunities appear when a technology has already crossed into the next stage but the world still values it as if it has not.
Thus, the hardest part is not predicting the future, it is recognizing what stage you are looking at before everyone else does.
