Mapping the Unknown – The Ten Steps to Map Any Industry

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

 Lǎozi 老子

I just had lunch with Shenwei, one of my ex-students who had just taken a job in a mid-sized consulting firm.  After a bit of catching up I offered he was looking a bit lost. “I just got handed a project to help our firm enter a new industry – semiconductors. They want me to map out the space so we can figure out where we can add value.

When I asked what they already knew about it, they tossed me a tall stack of industry and stock analyst reports, company names, web sites, blogs. I started reading through a bunch of it and I’m drowning in data but don’t know where to start. I feel like I don’t know a thing.”

I told Shenwei I was happy for him because he had just been handed an awesome learning opportunity – how to rapidly understand and then map any new market. He gave me a “easy for you to say” look, but before he could object I handed him a pen and a napkin and asked him to write down the names of companies and concepts he read about that have anything to do with the semiconductor business – in 30 seconds. He quickly came up with a list with 9 names/terms. (See Mapping – First Pass)

“Great, now we have a start. Now give me a few words that describe what they do, or mean, or what you don’t know about them.”

Don’t let the enormity of unknowns frighten you. Start with what you do know.

After a few minutes he came up with a napkin sketch that looked like the picture in Mapping – Second Pass. 
Now we had some progress.

I pointed out he now had a starter list that not only contained companies but the beginning of a map of the relationships between those companies. And while he had a few facts, others were hypotheses and concepts. And he had a ton of unanswered questions.

We spent the next 20 minutes deconstructing that sketch and mapping out the Second Pass list as a diagram (see Mapping – Third Pass.)

As you keep reading more materials, you’ll have more questions than facts. Your goal is to first turn the questions into testable hypotheses (guesses). Then see if you can find data that turns the hypotheses into facts. For a while the questions will start accumulating faster than the facts. That’s OK.

Note that even with just the sparse set of information Shenwei had, in the bottom right-hand corner of his third mapping pass, a relationship diagram of the semiconductor industry was beginning to emerge.

Drawing a diagram of the relationships of companies in an industry can help you deeply understand how the industry works and who the key players are. Start building one immediately. As you find you can’t fill in all the relationships, the gaps outlining what you need to learn will become immediately visible.

As the information fog was beginning to lift, I could see Shenwei’s confidence returning. I pointed out that he had a real advantage that his assignment was in a known industry with lots of available information. He quickly realized that he could keep adding information to the columns in the third mapping pass as he read through the reports and web sites.

Google and Google Scholar are your best friends. As you discover new information increase your search terms.

My suggestion was to use the diagram in the third mapping pass as the beginning of a wall chart – either physically (or virtually if he could keep it in all in his head). And every time he learned more about the industry to update the relationship diagram of the industry and its segments. (When he pointed out that there were existing diagrams of the semiconductor industry he could copy, I suggested that he ignore them. The goal was for him to understand the industry well enough that he could draw his own map ab initio – from the beginning. And if he did so, he might create a much better one.)

When lunch was over Shenwei asked if it was OK if he checked in with me as he learned new things and I agreed. What he didn’t know was that this was only the first step in a ten-step industry mapping process.

Epilog

Over the next few weeks Shenwei shared what he had learned and sent me his increasingly refined and updated industry relationship map. (The 4th  mapping pass showed up 48 hours later.)In exchange I shared with him the news that he was on step one of a ten step industry mapping program. Other the next few weeks he quickly built on the industry map to answer questions 2 through 10 below.

Two weeks later he handed his leadership an industry report that covered the ten steps below and contained a sophisticated industry diagram he created from scratch. A far cry from his original napkin sketch!

Six months later his work on this project convinced his company that there was a large opportunity in the semiconductor space, and they started a new practice with him in it. His work won him the “best new employee” award.

The Ten Steps to Map any Industry

Start by continuously refining your understanding of the industry by diagramming it. List all the new words you encounter and create a glossary in your own words. Start collecting the best sources of information you’ve read.

Basic Industry Understanding

  1. Diagram the industry and its segments
    1. Start with anything
    2. Build your learning by successive iteration
    3. Who are the key suppliers to each segment?
    4. How does this industry feed into the larger economy?
  2. Create a glossary of industry unique terms
    1. Can you explain them to others? Are there analogies to other markets?
  3. Who are the industry experts in each segment? For the entire industry?
    1. Economic experts? E.g. industry analysts, universities, think tanks
    2. Technology experts? E.g. universities, think tanks
    3. Geographic experts?
  4. Key Conferences, blogs, web sites, etc.
    1. What are the best opensource data feeds?
    2. What are the best paid resources?
Overlay numbers, dollars, market share, Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) on all parts of the industry diagram. That will inform velocity and direction of the market.

Detailed Industry Understanding

  1. Who are the market leaders? New entrants? In revenue, market share and growth rate
    1. In the U.S.
    2. Western countries
    3. China
  2. Understand the technology flows
    1. Who builds on top of who
    2. Who is critical versus who can be substituted
  3. Understand the economic flows
    1. Who buys from who in this industry
    2. Who buys the output from this industry.
    3. How cyclical is demand?
    4. What are the demand drivers?
    5. How do companies inside each segment get funded? Any differences in capital requirements? Ease of starting, etc.
  4. If applicable, understand the personnel flow for each segment
    1. Do people move just between their segments or up and down through the entire industry?
    2. Where do they get trained?
The beginner’s forecasting method is to simply extrapolate current growth rates forward. But in today’s technology markets, discontinuities are coming fast and furious. Are there other technologies from adjacent markets will impact this one? (e.g. AI, Quantum, High performance computing,…?). Are there other global or national economic initiatives that could change the shape of the market?

Forecasting

  1. What’s changed in the last 10 years? 5 years?
    1. Diagram the past incarnations of the industry
  2. What’s going to change in the next 5 years?
    1. Any big insight on disruption?
    2. New entrants?
    3. New technology?
    4. New foreign suppliers?
    5. Diagram your model of the industry in 5 years

National Industrial Policy – Private Capital and The America’s Frontier Fund Steps Up

This article previously appeared in The National Interest.

Last month the U.S. passed the CHIPS and Science Act, one of the first pieces of national industrial policy – government planning and intervention in a specific industry — in the last 50 years, in this case for semiconductors. After the celebratory champagne has been drunk and the confetti floats to the ground it’s helpful to put the CHIPS Act in context and understand the work that government and private capital have left to do.

Today the United States is in great power competition with China. It’s a contest over which nation’s diplomatic, information, military and economic system will lead the world in the 21st century. And the result is whether we face a Chinese dystopian future or a democratic one, where individuals and nations get to make their own choices. At the heart of this contest is leadership in emerging and disruptive technologies – running the gamut from semiconductors and supercomputers to biotech and blockchain and everything in between.

National Industrial Policy – U.S. versus China
Unlike the U.S., China manages its industrial policy via top-down 5-year plans. Their overall goal is to turn China into a technologically advanced and militarily powerful state that can challenge U.S. commercial and military leadership. Unlike the U.S., China has embraced the idea that national security is inexorably intertwined with commercial technology (semiconductors, drones, AI, machine learning, autonomy, biotech, cyber, semiconductors, quantum, high-performance computing, commercial access to space, et al.)  They’ve made what they call military/civil fusion – building a dual-use ecosystem by tightly coupling their commercial technology companies with their defense ecosystem.

China has used its last three 5-year plans to invest in critical technologies (semiconductors, supercomputers, Al/ML, quantum, access to space, biotech.) as a national priority. They have built a sophisticated public/private financing ecosystem to support these plans. The Chinese technology funding ecosystem includes regional investment funds that exceed 700 billion dollars (what they call their Civil/Military Guidance Funds). These are investment vehicles in which central and local government agencies make investments that are combined with private venture capital and State-Owned Enterprises in areas of strategic importance. They are tightly coupling critical civilian companies to their defense ecosystem to help them develop military weapons and strategic surprises. (Tai Ming Cheung’s book is the best description of the system.)

The U.S. has nothing comparable.

In contrast, for the last several decades, planning in the U.S. economy was left to “the market.” Driven by economic theory from the Chicago School of Economics, its premise is that free markets best allocate resources in an economy and that minimal, or even no, government intervention is best for economic prosperity. We ran our economy on this theory as a bipartisan experiment in the U.S. for the last several decades. Optimizing profit above else led to wholesale offshoring of manufacturing and entire industries in order to lower costs. Investors shifted to making massive investments in industries with the quickest and greatest returns without long-term capital investments (e.g. social media, ecommerce, gaming) instead of in hardware, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, transportation infrastructure, etc. The result was that by default, private equity and venture capital were the de facto decision makers of U.S. industrial policy.

With the demise of the Soviet Union and the U.S. as the sole superpower, this “profits first” strategy was “good enough” as there was no other nation that could match our technical superiority. That changed when we weren’t paying attention.

China’s Ambition and Strategic Surprises
In the first two decades of the 21st century, while the U.S. was focused on combating non-nation states (ISIS, Al-Qaeda…) U.S. policymakers failed to understand China’s size, scale, ambition, and national commitment to surpass the U.S. as the global leader in technology. Not just in “a” technology but in all of those that are critical to both our national and economic security in this century.

China’s top-down national industrial policy means we are being out-planned, outmanned, and outspent. By some estimates, China could be the leader in a number of critical technology areas sooner than we think. While Chinese investment in technology at times has been redundant and wasteful, the sum of these tech investments has resulted in a series of strategic surprises to the U.S.– hypersonics, ballistic missiles with maneuverable warheads as aircraft carrier killers, fractional orbital bombardment systems, rapid advances in space, semiconductors, supercomputers, and biotech …with more surprises likely – all with the goal to gain superiority over the U.S. both commercially and militarily.

Limits and Obstacles to China’s Dominance
However, America has advantages that China lacks: capital markets that can be incented not coerced, untapped innovation talent willing to help, labor markets that can be upskilled, university and corporate research that still excels, etc. At the same time, a few cracks are showing in China’s march to technology supremacy; their detention of some of their most successful entrepreneurs and investors, a crackdown on “superfluous” tech (gaming, online tutoring) and a slowdown of listings on the China’s version of NASDAQ, the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR Market – may signal that the party is reining in its “anything goes” approach to pass the U.S.  Simultaneously the U.S. Commerce department has begun to prohibit export of critical equipment and components that China has needed to build their tech ecosystem.

Billionaires and Venture Capital Funding Defense Innovation
In the U.S. DoD’s traditional suppliers of defense tools, technologies, and weapons – the prime contractors and federal labs – are no longer the leaders in many of these emerging and disruptive  technologies.  And while the Department of Defense has world-class people and organizations it’s for a world that no longer exists. (Its inability to rapidly acquire and deploy commercial systems requires an organizational redesign on the scale of Goldwater/Nichols Act, not a reform.)

Technology innovation in many areas now falls to commercial companies. In lieu of a coherent U.S. national investment strategy across emerging and disruptive technologies (think of the CHIPS Act times ten), billionaires in the U.S. have started their own initiatives – Elon Musk – SpaceX and Starlink (reusable rockets and space-based broadband internet), Palmer Lucky –  Anduril (AI and Machine Learning for defense), Peter Theil – Palantir (data analytics). And in the last few years a series of defense-focused venture funds – Shield Capital, Lux Capital, and others – have emerged.

However, depending on billionaires interested in defense is not a sustainable strategy, and venture capital invests in businesses that can become profitable in 10 years or less. This means that technologies that might take decades to mature (fusion, activities in space, new industrial processes, …) get caught up and die in a “Valley of Death.” Attempts to bridge this Valley of Death often find technology companies relying on Government capital. These programs (DIU, In-Q-Tel, AFWERX, et al), are limited in scope, time and success at scale. These government investment programs have largely failed to scale these emerging and disruptive technologies for four reasons:

  • Government agencies have limited access to top investment talent to help them make sophisticated technical investment decisions
  • Government agencies lack the commercialization skills to help founders turn technical ideas into commercial ventures.
  • While the Dept of Defense has encouraged starting new ventures, it has failed to match it with the acquisition dollars to scale them. There’s no DoD coherent/committed strategy to create a new generation of prime contractors around these emerging and disruptive technologies.
  • No private or government funds operates as “patient capital” – investing in critical deep technologies that may take more than a decade to mature and scale

America’s Frontier Fund
Today one private capital fund is attempting to solve this problem. Gilman Louie, the founder of In-Q-Tel, has started America’s Frontier Fund (AFF.) This new fund will invest in key critical deep technologies to help the U.S. keep pace with the Chinese onslaught of capital focused on this area. AFF plans to raise one billion dollars in “patient private capital” from both public and private sources and to be entirely focused on identifying critical technologies and strategic investing. Setting up their fund as a non-profit allows them to focus on long-term investments for the country, not just what’s expedient to maximize profits. It will ensure these investments grow into large commercial and dual-use companies focused on the national interest.

They’ve built an extraordinary team of experienced venture capitalists (I’ve known Gilman Louie and Steve Weinstein for decades), a world-class chief scientist, a startup incubation team, and they come with a unique and deep understanding of the intersection of national security and emerging and disruptive technologies.

AFF is the most promising effort I have seen in tackling the long-term challenges of funding and scaling emerging and disruptive technologies head-on.

At stake is whether the rest of the 21st century will be determined by an authoritarian government wiling to impose a dystopian future on the world, or free nations able to determine their own future.

These are tough problems to solve, and no single fund is can take on the massive investments China is making, but it’s possible that the AFF’s market driven approach, when combined with the government’s halting steps reengaging in industrial policy, can tip the scale back in our favor.

Here’s hoping they succeed.

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