the blade runner principle

February 09, 2022

Do androids actually dream of electric sheep? The answer is obviously and wonderfully unclear. If you stay close to the letter of the Philip K. Dick novel that inspired the cult classic film Blade Runner (1982), the answer to the pithy question is probably closer to a yes than if you stick with the film's interpretation.

The nuance in the question that the book and film explore (way more nuance than I could do justice to here) resonates with macro trends in recent innovation. Without getting too philosophical, the kinds of trends that shape the technology we use and build often seem to be moved by designs and ambitions that are based not on the technology's current state, but on a range of possible future states for it. It is inherent in innovation that technology must dream of itself as something other than what it is in order to keep its own progression going. This is what makes this work exciting and difficult to predict for many of us.

I call this trend The Blade Runner Principle, and today, it goes something like this:

Products dream of themselves as Platforms

Platforms dream of themselves as Infrastructure

As we know, many successful ventures seem to surround products that veer away from what most conventional thinking would define as a distinct product - an app that does something - and instead steer toward platforms - tools that enable other tools to do what they want to do. Eventually, some of these platforms underlie or enable so much of what wants to be done that they become infrastructure - a prerequisite for the fundamental needs of other ventures to be met.

While the largest cloud providers, specifically AWS, clearly did this before it was cool or was even recognized as a strategy, fintech has now graduated a mature crop of its stalwarts to this category. Stripe or Plaid, to mention just two of an ever-growing list of similar companies, are increasingly ecosystems of their own that not only spawn and sustain multiple revenue streams but that do so by enabling layers of innovation to be launched on top of them. Cloud providers and core service providers of this kind increasingly share a similar function as part of emerging stacks.

Leonard Kleinrock argues that when its full potential is realized, the internet will be invisible on account of its own ubiquity. The internet hasn't reached this state yet (though we've probably never been closer to it), but ventures centered on the movement of money seem to dream of that version of themselves constantly, especially as they become increasingly embedded within archipelagos of complementary experiences. Payments, for example, seem to be increasingly designed as adjacent experiences to the 'other things' that they facilitate, as if they wanted to disappear by melting into the other stuff that surrounds them (some explicitly, manifestly want to do this).

If you have never heard that the product you are building now dreams of itself as a platform, you probably will at some point soon. If you are hearing of your own platform dreaming of itself as infrastructure, then you are probably on this wavelength already. It seems to pay off to lean into the Blade Runner Principle, but that doesn't mean all these dreams are going to come true. The work that will bridge the gap between android dreams and the technology we will end up adopting is pretty real. There is also plenty of room to innovate in the many gaps that these evolving ventures will surely leave behind unexplored.