In the spirit of Startup Weekend, I thought it would be interesting to go back in time and pretend to pitch one of the most disruptive innovations of the 19th century: the automobile.

Typically pitches start by first outlining the problem. The idea is to make your audience aware of the pain point, so that they feel excited when you ultimately pitch your solution.

In the case of cars, the incumbent technology would have been horses. So I can imagine somebody standing up and talking about how horses are slow and how they drop stinky poo all over our city streets. And that the time has come for a revolution in personal mobility! Enough of this crap! :)

But while many of us probably can’t imagine a world without cars, try and put yourself in the shoes of somebody at the end of the 19th century who can’t imagine a world without horses. And then think about all the things we have subsequently done to make cars thrive:

• We paved roads and created networks of freeways.

• We invented rules of the road to ensure that people were operating these new devices properly.

• We created a licensing system to ensure that anybody who was operating a car was doing so relatively safely and following the rules that had been created.

In the spirit of Startup Weekend, I thought it would be interesting to go back in time and pretend to pitch one of the most disruptive innovations of the 19th century: the automobile.

Typically pitches start by first outlining the problem. The idea is to make your audience aware of the pain point, so that they feel excited when you ultimately pitch your solution.

In the case of cars, the incumbent technology would have been horses. So I can imagine somebody standing up and talking about how horses are slow and how they drop stinky poo all over our city streets. And that the time has come for a revolution in personal mobility! Enough of this crap! :)

But while many of us probably can’t imagine a world without cars, try and put yourself in the shoes of somebody at the end of the 19th century who can’t imagine a world without horses. And then think about all the things we have subsequently done to make cars thrive:

• We paved roads and created networks of freeways.

• We invented rules of the road to ensure that people were operating these new devices properly.

• We created a licensing system to ensure that anybody who was operating a car was doing so relatively safely and following the rules that had been created.