CHAPTER 2 Glimpsing the Future

Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them.

—Peter Thiel, Zero to One

 

ON A QUIET SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN THE SUMMER OF 2011, THE CITY OF Maia, a municipality in the northern Portugal metropolitan area of Porto, is a postindustrial stage set with empty cobblestone streets. A pair of down-and-out citizens confer on a street corner. At around five o'clock, however, Maia comes to life: elderly Portuguese women (some dressed in black) stake their places at the outdoor cafés. Skirts too short are duly noted, as are who walks arm-in-arm with whom—the matriarchy hard at work mending tears in the social fabric. On Monday morning the city reinvents itself: the outdoor cafés host a different generation: middle-aged tourists, businesspeople, shopkeepers, women shopping, and taxi drivers.

Maia, like all cities, is in a state of evolution. (Maia was, after all, the Greek goddess of growth and creativity.) Lifestyles change and cities must change, too. As futurist Stewart Brand said in his book How Buildings Learn, "Cities are at war with time and change . . . and they always lose." The sounds of Maia are still village sounds in spite of the office towers, shopping malls, and proximity to the gleaming futuristic Porto Airport. Roosters, barking dogs, birds, the occasional midnight firecracker, and other sounds of human activity echo in the canyons created by the buildings. Behind the Hotel Central Parque, a place that figures centrally in our story, is an immaculate community garden. The hotel's bar and dining room were by all accounts the scene of audacious dreams and late-night conversations in the months stretching from late 2008 to early 2010. Walking down the empty streets of Maia, it is hard to imagine that this is where a team of future-builders, refugees from various industries, planned a bold new city, a living laboratory, a high-tech experiment called PlanIT Valley.

Years after these first meetings, the original members of the startup company that calls itself Living PlanIT—the men and women we introduce in this chapter—remember this time fondly. It was a kind of crucible in which the raw beginnings of so many of their current efforts were forged. It began with a vision. The sense of ownership they felt, and in many cases continue to feel, for that vision was powerful even as it changed and evolved, shedding some ideas and layering on others.

This, we believe, is how future-building happens. It starts when a leader glimpses a new possibility and proceeds when a diverse team commits to making it happen.