A new gold mine?

Note: This is the VC MG Siegler article, the original text published in Medium.

As an investor, I've seen hundreds of startups, and if I'm a writer, I've seen thousands of them. Having mastered such a large amount of data, my view of the trend is naturally beginning to clear. There have been two such trends in the past few months. The relationship between them can be said to be connected and not related.

They are related because they are new platforms and are the foundation of a large number of corporate development. It seems a bit strange because there hasn't been a real new platform for a long time to take the baton from the mobile hand.

That's irrelevant because they're quite different. One is the block ring chain (blockchain). The other is virtual reality.

For those who care about technical news, both are quite obvious. It's not just that Zuckerberg announces that virtual reality will be the next platform, and then 2 billion dollars buys Oculus. The key is that developers buy and invest a lot of time.

My feeling is that everyone who has shown me this time has been directly or indirectly connected to one of these two areas. That was not the case 1 years ago. Social and mobile apps were the main ideas of developers at the time.

But the history of these two areas is not short. This is not to say that these areas are not going to be great startups-there's gotta be. But the barriers to entry are much higher because these platforms are now more mature. The first advantage no longer exists. The only way to truly succeed is to leapfrog development and to do much better than everyone who is doing it now.

(Warning: New mobile devices and APIs, such as what Apple has just released in iOS 8, have the potential to open new markets)

For virtual reality and block chain, it is still an early stage of the wild. But both seem to have catalysts that are about to move from simple promising technologies to real platforms. Virtual reality has Oculus. The block chain has bitcoin.

A new gold mine?

I'm not a bitcoin expert. My position remains the same: Bitcoin is fascinating, but I question its long-term potential as a widely disseminated currency. But I do believe in the basic idea of Bitcoin-block chains, which have all kinds of infinite possibilities.

I believe developers also support this idea. It's not just that we see the entrepreneurial display directly related to Bitcoin, but also that we're starting to see the entrepreneurial rollout that's done around the block chain.

As for virtual reality, although the concept is not new, it seems to be Oculus this device let it into the mainstream. But Facebook's takeover has made it a splash in the developer community. Perhaps because we now know that a technology giant will support and trust Oculus, which gives them the necessary confidence to go all out for the development of the platform.

But that does not mean that Oculus will surely be the winner in the field. Sony and other rivals are eyeing it. Regardless of who wins, these factors have put virtual reality into a viable platform stage.

All this makes me excited (as an investor, a technology fanatic, a user's identity). We may yet again be on the verge of an upheaval that has not been seen since the iphone. Despite the technology media's focus on television and wearable hype as the next potential platform (undoubtedly related to Apple's future offerings), I think many people overlook these two ready-made platforms.

It's even more exciting if you believe that these two platforms will take off at the same time. So I did not write the title of the article as a platform for battle, but the platform of contention. It is entirely possible that they wing. The size of the developer community around them must be large enough to support them at the same time.

With the last great platform-moving in the developed markets saturated and rapidly penetrating into the developing market, the next platform appears springtime. Obviously, developers have already started betting.

[This article compiles from: Medium.com]