You probably missed it.
Nearly everyone did.
At the end of last year Kansas City quietly became the first metro area to be wired with Google Fiber. KC is now plugged into Google’s high-speed internet utopia.
“High-speed” doesn’t do this justice. It’s not just faster… it’s 100x faster.
Yeah.
100x.
To put this into perspective, imagine your current car.
It’s nice.
It’s fine.
It can do 80 without much rattling.
Along comes your neighbor Larry.
He’s got a new car.
It’s faster.
It can go 8,000 miles an hour.
Safety concerns aside… this is much better.
Welcome to KC internet service… where you can download every Beatles song in one second.
This is the future.
And it will be awesome.
But it started out as a Google Moon Shot.
Google shoots for the moon. Incremental change doesn't interest them. This isn’t shocking considering Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google when they attempted to download the entire internet.
The whole thing.
That’s a big goal.
Maybe even a bit crazy.
That’s the essence of a Moon Shot. It’s a ridiculously impossible goal. It’s like taking a Jim Collins’ BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) and then feeding it nothing but pure optimism and Red Bull + Vodkas for a week. The result is a Moon Shot.
Kinda like planning to give the world internet speeds 100x faster than everyday broadband.
Moon Shots require a “healthy disregard for the impossible.”
Not that saving $94 a house in drywall isn’t a noble pursuit, but where is your Moon Shot?
Who’s got one?
Ikea does.
Apparently they’ve been studying urban design after allen-wrenching all the dorm furniture. Ikea recently purchased 26 acres of land outside London. At an expense of around a half billion dollars, they will be building an Ikea City. It will have retail and schools and theaters and hotels. It will be privately-owned and managed. It will have all-rental neighborhoods housing 6000+.
Oh yeah.
The residential units will be Ikea’s BoKlok prefab house [2].
All BoKlok prefabs, all the time.
Ikea diving headlong into housing, eh?
Sound crazy?
Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page has said, “If you’re not doing something crazy, you’re doing the wrong things.”
Sure, you say, it’s easy to chase Moon Shots when your market cap is north of $260,000,000,000.
You still need Moon Shots.
You still need to think big.
At Red Angle [3] we have a Moon Shot.
We plan to bridge the English-Spanish language gap in construction. Essentially we want a solution to: “Why don’t they just learn English?”
We will develop an entertaining and memorable learning path to get Spanish-speakers hablando inglés quickly. Starting with language skills for the jobsite.
It will include audio, video, apps, text, workbooks, and mentoring to improve both verbal and written language skills.
And it will all be on-demand.
And free.
Big goal, right?
Crazy, even?
I hope so.
Otherwise we’re not thinking big enough.
Now it’s your turn… What’s your Moon Shot?
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