Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?

As the vaccination campaign rolls out in most of the world’s industrialized countries, a feeling of relief is washing over businesses and industries affected by lockdowns. Finally, after more than a year, consumer trends are slowly getting back to normal. Those trends are not yet as they were before the pandemic, which will take at least one more year, but at least we are starting to get there.

Many businesses are making plans for the coming year and adapting their value chain and value proposition for the new way consumers are going to spend their resources, focusing more on an economy of “being” instead of an economy of “having.”

This represents a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs. People are eager to go out and resume their normal lives, going out with friends, traveling, working out at the gym and in general, living life without a face mask on. In the following months, we will see a new wave of companies trying to catch the wave of this new trend, but 99.9 percent of them will fail within 12 months because they will try to create products and services for a new economy using concepts from an old one.

The pandemic put the spotlight on systemic problems we always had as society: inequalities, politics over health and the disregard past generations had toward the environment or even for addressing such systemic issues. Those problems always have represented a huge opportunity not just for change and doing good; they represent a massive opportunity for doing business and such business will catch the attention of the new generations and the attention of this new economy, which is more aware of this problem and is way more interested in addressing and solving these problems.

If you want to become a billionaire, it’s easy: go out and solve a billion-dollar problem. If you do not know which problem, just turn on the news, wait a few minutes and you will have at least a couple to work on.

New consumer trends, people more aware of their surroundings, environment and societal inequalities, and investors willing to take a risk and bet on new companies addressing these opportunities will create a new generation of socially responsible entrepreneurs because doing good is great business.

If you are thinking about starting a company in the near future, it is your choice to take advantage of this new opportunity and create something really world-changing. Or, you can be like everyone else and try to build a new social network, a new app or whatever other now irrelevant business and be just another statistic among the 99.9 percent of companies that will fail in the coming years.