Pick them up at Blockbuster

My first company let you pick up your photos at the nearest Blockbuster.

Read that sentence again.

Revele Ya. Buenos Aires, 2003. You uploaded your photos, we printed them on Fujifilm paper, and you got them at home or at a Blockbuster on your way back from work.

Before Fujifilm, I went to Kodak. They passed. Nobody, they said, is going to upload their photos to a website. It was right after the dot-com crash. They had a point. They were also wrong.

Seven years later I sold the company. To the Fujifilm side. For less than I wanted.

Then, one after the other, every word in that first sentence stopped existing. Printing photos. Picking things up. Blockbuster. Kodak, almost.

I'd like to tell you I saw it coming. I'm not sure I did.

A market doesn't close. It moves. And it never sends a letter to tell you.

Now, with every new project, I ask a question I didn't know to ask back then.

Not "who else does this?"

"What would make people stop needing this at all?"

If you can't answer, keep watching.

If you can, that's your real competitor.