Reid Hoffman on entrepreneurial opportunities in the future "Resource revolution"

Over the next 15 years, 2.5 billion people from China, India and other developing countries will enter the middle class. They will need to live in high-rise buildings and need supermarkets to shop. They need smartphones, cars, steaks, air-conditioning, pet clothing, Disneyland vacations and couch pillows.

Today, the Earth to feed 2 billion of the middle class has been under great pressure, how can we feed 2.5 billion medium-production consumers?

Many observers believe that this unprecedented economic growth predicts the downfall of Malthus Malthusian. In this case, the demand for natural resources is an outbreak of growth, which will lead to a large number of uncontrolled carbon emissions, water resources war, large-scale vegetation destruction, the gap between rich and poor rapidly expanding.

Matt Rogers, an energy expert at McKinsey Consulting, and Stanford University professor Stefan Heck a more optimistic view of the future. Their latest book, The Resource Revolution, shows how the third industrial revolution, focused on fundamentally optimizing land use and natural resources, is starting to look like it.

They argue that the contradiction between the limited resources and the unlimited demand for natural resources and the final product will not bring disaster. On the contrary, this contradiction will become "the biggest business opportunity of this century". A shortage of resources will encourage companies to adopt new technologies, new production processes, and new management methods that will accelerate social innovation.

As the global middle class population grows, entrepreneurs will have plenty of opportunities to build more efficient industrial and commercial ecosystems. Technology and industry will collide in a new, unpredictable way. These parts of the collision caused by the shortage, will give the community a greater unity and prosperity.

In the automotive industry, for example, over the past century, automobile production processes have been continuously improved to increase sales and enhance global competitiveness. It builds the ecosystem of distributors, service stations, roads, highways, parking lots, fast food restaurants, which are so powerful and pervasive that driving in America is as natural as breathing.

Although the car culture has been formed, but the automobile industry as a whole is very inefficient. This inefficiency is reflected not only in the Chevrolet Camaro (the Hornet of the Transformers) but only 14 miles per gallon. Even the energy-efficient cars don't have much time to stay open. The average car journey time is only 4%. And in the limited time that the car uses, it is also very energy-intensive.

Amory Lovins, a physicist and environmental scientist, argues that the vast majority of the energy consumed in automobiles is a waste of heat distribution, tire wear, idling and air-conditioning systems, and that less than 1% of energy is used to drive drivers forward. By the same token, the maximum utilization rate of roads is only 5%.

In recent years, however, technological innovations driven by energy shortages have focused on automotive batteries, consumer electronics, information technology, and so on, without dramatically improving engine systems.

Tesla and Toyota are producing high torque and low cost electric vehicles. Zipcar,uber and other similar services have made sharing cars as convenient and reliable as owning cars. This allows more cars to travel on the road than in the parking lot. Unmanned technology will be the first in 2017 for the mass market, in this trend, Google is a pioneer, and almost all the major carmakers and research institutions are relentless pursuit of this goal. The high efficiency of this technology will eventually enable the 4-lane expressway to reach the 32-lane freeway.

The future of the car not only more energy-saving, but also cheaper, more extensive user, more convenient and fast. Thanks to self-driving technology and car-sharing services, blind people and the elderly can go where they want without help. Parking spaces will be eliminated as dial-up, and suburban parking garages will be leased to countless start-ups through Airbnb and other sharing platforms.

In general, efficient use of resources, such as raw materials, water and energy, means smarter use of them. This is what the Web and platform do. Over the past decade, through platforms such as Linkedin,facebook and Twitter, we have been able to share information about people and institutions well and create a real-time picture of relationships, networks, and information flows.

We need more innovation in the field of IoT, that is, linking items to the Internet and even to other items. With more and more large-scale network connections, resource utilization can be greatly improved. Tesla, for example, can learn more about how consumers use their products than other carmakers because Tesla cars can send back information about when and where the car will be used (with the consumer's consent). This information will also help Tesla decide which optimizations to make for the future of the product.

In Greylock, my colleague Josh Elman a company called SmartThings, which is developing the world's Physical Atlas (physical graph) platform to connect different household products online. In the future, we will be able to collect millions of refrigerators and thermostat data, and use this data to reduce the energy consumption of refrigerators, and make all products easier to use, more fun. In this big environment, endless opportunities are waiting for the entrepreneur.

This is not to say that it is easy to dramatically increase resource utilization to meet the fast-growing needs of the middle class. Matt and Stefen also mentioned in their new book that there is a need for long-term thinking and appropriate government support. Not all companies will welcome the challenge, but companies looking for more efficient use of resources will ease the pressure on the middle class, which has increased over the next 15 years.