TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Alexis Madrigal:

The question is, as it has always been: now what?

Decades ago, the answer was, “Build the Internet.” Fifteen years ago, it was, “Build the Web.” Five years ago, the answers were probably, “Build the social network” or “Build the mobile web.” And it was in around that time in 2007 that Facebook emerged as the social networking leader, Twitter got known at SXSW, and we saw the release of the first Kindle and the first iPhone. There are a lot of new phones that look like the iPhone, plenty of e-readers that look like the Kindle, and countless social networks that look like Facebook and Twitter. In other words, we can cross that task off the list. It happened.

We now have the tools to do incredible things, but what precisely that is isn’t as obvious as it use to be. Before, the harder question was how. Now the questions we should be spending more time on are what and why.

Answering those questions is now going to provide much, much more leverage than answering the how.