First wave of tycoons : Oil and Gas

A mini wave called wave 1a. :  Commodities processing, Steel and Coal , industrial goods processing mainly for Oil and gas and distribution Infrastructure around the Oil and Gas industry ( mainly due to available oil and gas and a demand to cater to those who want the energy )

Second wave: Transportation , Motors, Shipping, Mining and Rail Road ( again fueled and consumed in part by Oil and Gas )

Third wave : Every other wave will again give rise to support industries which are not major trends in themselves ( Example : Tyre giants that rode the Ford wave )

Fourth wave : Real Estate, Retail, Fashion , Luxury, Food and beverages  ( Powered by a stable environment and infra in the country which has created jobs which in turn has just begun consumerism – people buying offices, houses, whatever they could get their hands on with the new found employment basically)

Fifth wave : Finance of all the above – hedge funds, PEs and the like leverage and deleverage the commoditised industries  – in the process creating the Berkshires and Fidelities of the world along with the Insurance giants

Sixth wave : Consumerism takes hold in an enormous wave due to all the above created jobs   – access to healthcare , entertainment ( The vegas boom) and other sensory enjoyments spawn ( Organised Studio entertainment, International media groups ( Murdoch, Disney etc ) come to life  – industries come into their own to cater to the affluent and their leisure time  )

Seventh wave – still goes on : A new wave of consumerism begins , this time hardware driven ( TVs, Radios , then PCs and Servers and this will eventually lead to Smart phones and Tablets  and now smart watches, smart head gear cameras, smart underweares (!??) )

Emboldened by ever-widening access to masses through 7th wave tech, the 6th wave titans become even stronger. Little do they know that their asses are going to be kicked by the 8th wave of disruption which they cant control inspite of all thay might ( Youtube vs TV, FB vs Mysapce ( Murdoch ) )

Eighth Wave – just beginning and will go on well into the future : Software eats the world bringing not only efficiency but also consolidating fragmented and localised markets as a market place on top of the sixth wave infra. ( Amazon , Google, Airbnb, Etsy, Ebay, Uber )

Ninth Wave : hardware efficiency plays (ubiquiti ) follow the software innovations followed by a virtuous cycle of software efficiency plays ( Big data)  supported by the hardware plays again ( Kiva systems)

Tenth wave : Solar PV starts to make sense. cost of Wind power beats cost of coal and Gas. Reinvents the First wave. Li Ion makes sense already in some places for storage and distribution of power. Combine this with the Seventh, Eight and Ninth wave innovations and you have wireless power transmission, data monitoring of micro power plants and remote management of remote power PV plants . Do the permutations of the industry it could open up for you now.  Nuclear fission starts to work on commercial scale and makes sense too!! Just not yet at a micro scale.

Mini Wave 10 a : If you are intelligent you will see the pattern here and what this wave is and would get to it in manufacturing and support all around whatever I mentioned in wave 10.

Wave 11 : okay – so what transports humans or cargoes and rides on the commercialisation of a new cheaper source of energy now made available ?? Hmm. You get the picture right. EV unless ofcourse you build micro nuclear fusion or even fission reactors and put them on large commercial ships . Oh wait that already exists! Just not  commercialised yet. ( Maybe I will detail in another post why Nuclear commercial shipping is the future )

Wave 12 : Its already here . Your newest form of sensory entertainment. Brace yourself. If I were you and wanted to be the 12th wave tycoon and was born in the 2000s, I would be building Virtual reality software platforms ( RIFT ) ,all the smart hardware suits that will be built around RIFT, RIFT apps and hang in there for 10 years. Better yet, build a RIFT competitor! See a doctor, try out a new dress, go visit that new house you want to buy. Everything that can be done by your eyes, and ears can be done remotely with Oculus. How long do you think it will take to manipulate the olfactory and kinesthetic signals and transmit them to your brain like auditory and visual. Not much longer.

Some of the sixth wave firms and seventh wave giants have merged to become a hybrid monster and will buy out more of the 10th, 11th and 12th wave ( Apple – Tesla, Softbank – SB Energy, FB – Oculus RIFT, Google – Nest )  but the barrier to entry in these later waves are so subtle that disruption is always much much faster than disrupting a deeply entrenched  First to Seventh wave industry conglomerate ( Example : Apple can’t and won’t touch a venture in construction or satellite transmission as it would in AI or EVs or Solar as for that matter ) . But then they fail to learn from history that no firm in any wave has ever managed to remain dominant for more than two waves. Its a DNA problem than its a money problem. You see – SolarCity would probably buy Bloom Energy but they wouldn’t touch Areva unless Areva makes commercial Nuclear fusion viable in the distant future .  Its DNA problem not a money problem.

Wave 13 : Analagous to retail as in Wave 4 eh?In retail,  Amazon better watch out ( Uber, 3 D printing , Hyperloop + Uber, Jet etc. are very credible threats).

Fashion is already gone. Luxottica owns all the ‘ cool brands’ until they turned around and found that the very concept that made them evergreen business -‘ fashion can never fade only morphed into something else ‘ has doomed their business now because the cool brands aren’t ‘bulgari’ and  ‘boss’ anymore. Its APPLE and BEATS  and TESLA. As wearables become the ‘cool brands’ you will see more of the older brands in Watches, Glasses, Clothes, Apparel and even underwears become ‘Smart’ enough that monopolies like luxottica shall at best be OEMs like what FoxCon has become. Although this might be in the second half of this century, definitely not anytime soon, you might even see brand new fashion startups that come up with smart clothing labels that change colours controlled by an app on your phone. These companies might be the next wave of Zaras and Yves Saint Laurents.

What this means is , print your smart 3D shirt , whose raw material just got delivered to you half an hour ago by Uber, change the design with an app and match it to your cargo pants. Say bye bye Amazon and fuck you Zara and be on your way to the party.

Wave 14 : Money + Software = you guessed it. 22nd century will see interplanetary digital commerce ( Thanks, Elon ). Do you really want to waste all that precious nuclear fuel transporting gold bars across planets. How stupid are you?   This in turn gives rise to financial instruments you might not have even hear of till now like – Securitising cash-flow generated from space ships, used for interplanetary transport and companies operating them like MAERSK  . People might even build a transco instrument and take it public on the digital exchanges which trades in bitcoins by then.

Okay enough hallucination but back to the core points now.

Notice how :

1. One wave of boom usually rides on the back of one or a combination of a few previous ones. This has gigantic consequence as the sheer amount of permutations and combinations could give rise to tech that is unforeseen till now- like Cybernetic systems,  terraforming seas oceans and deserts, atmosphere creation  , synthetic foods , robotics and space transport are created parallely making the possibilities endless and giving rise to brand new offshoot waves that go on to to have their technological ripples . Technology USED to happen serially /  linearly ( waves 1 to 4 maybe ) but the pace has been accelerating and the gaps between waves have become intersections . Its COMPOUNDING PARALLELY aka known as EXPONENTIALLY.  Which is why AI is a very very real threat and is inevitable. Humans will try to re create consciousness and no one can predict the repercussions- good or bad.

2. As we speak , the ninth wave is reinventing the first wave ( Solar, Fission and Wind vs Oil and Gas ). Study the 1st and 2nd wave billionaires and see What does that tell you about the tenth wave or the eleventh wave billionaires and where will they come from ? If you chart out the Forbes 400 you can classify all the billionaires in one of the waves I have mentioned and they have a corresponing (1 wave = 10 years ) age gap between them approximately. Not accidentally.  Thats a pattern right there.

If I were playing the game in the 21st century, would you sit and watch from a 3rd wave industry? Hell no! The game is in waves 8, 9 , 10, 11 and 12 for the 21st century.

if you want to win a squash game, you need to already be where the ball is eventually going to make its  bounce on the floor , not where it is now hitting the wall