I look forward to being a speaker at this year’s NEXT conference in Berlin. I am invited to an on-stage debate with Patrick Meisberger, Managing Director of T-Venture (Deutsche Telekom’s VC segment), about the question “What does post-digital business really mean?”

To be honest: before thinking about post-digital business I had to come to grips with the term post-digital as such. What constitutes post-digitalism? And are we in a post-digital era then?

What defines post-digitalism?

Post-digitalism is supposed to mean that digital is so deeply woven into the fabrics of our everyday interactions that we are past the point of noticing the difference between digital and non-digital – and that we have fully included digital to our day-to-day life.

So what were the developments leading to this deep integration of digital into our realities? I argue we went through three major developments that partially took place in parallel: connecting, digitizing, paradigm-adaption.

Connecting everywhere and anytime.

In the late ’90s we have moved from an offline society to a society that went online from time to time. There was a clear state of mind associated to being online. You entered this other universe when going online. You had an online-self and an offline-self. Your online friends were not your offline friends. At any point in time you could easily answer the question, if you’re currently online or offline. In recent years we have transitioned to a society that no longer knows the difference between being online and being offline. Access to the web is so ubiquitous that the borders between the online and the offline universe have blurred. There are online features and offline features to your life. And both are so deeply intertwined that online-self and the offline-self converged.

What I just described is solely a result of easier access to the web, primarily driven by smart phones and tablets in connection with 3G. One may assume that it won’t get much easier to connect. It will get cheaper and faster. But essentially everyone is now connected all the time.

I’d be happy to proclaim the post-connect era. Everyone is connected all the time and everywhere.

Digitizing the real world.

The vast majority of enduring and successful mass-market concepts in the internet age thus far involved digitizing the real world. Email: write letters. Skype: Have phone conversations. Amazon: go shopping. iTunes: Buy music. NYT.com: read newspapers. Kindle: read books. eBay: post classifieds. Hulu: watch TV. These are all things that you did before the internet came along. They just got easier, cheaper, more convenient, more accessible and maybe more social. But in their essence they are just translations of old concepts to a new channel.

I believe that pretty much all of the interactions and products we knew in the pre-web world that are suitable for digitization have been digitized by now. And the digitized concepts often fully displaced the original concepts.

I’d be happy to proclaim the post-digitization era. Everything that can be digitized is digitized.

Shifting paradigms.

While I claim that most of the success-stories on the web so far are just old concepts on a new infrastructure and therefore mean no real cultural shift, we are now beginning to see that people develop fundamentally new values and behaviors in an online world. Let me give you an example of what I mean: access vs. ownership.

Think about it – people always wanted to own the music of their favorite bands. In the LP and CD ages people bought the physical objects and put them to their collections. In the napster era people often downloaded gazillions of songs just to own them, to have them on their hard drive. People downloaded songs from napster knowing that they would probably never listen to them and at the same time knowing that those same songs would still be available for download should they ever want to listen to them. Even iTunes is inherently based on owning. You buy the irrevocable right to listen to that song. Music consumption was all about owning - partially just for the sake of it.

Now comes spotify. They don’t sell music but access to music. You have access to basically all the music in the world. While you have a contract with them you may listen. When you cancel the contract all “your” music is gone.

Or consider DriveNow – short term on-demand cars available in bigger German cities. Wherever you are in Berlin, you just flip out your iPhone, search for a car near you, book it with a single click and you are ready to go. And when you don’t need that car anymore you just park it anywhere in the city and log-off. I have friends who sold the car they owned because they now have access to a car all the time.

You may argue that these are just old concepts on new channels as well. People listened to music and drove cars before. You are right. But the underlying economic mechanics have changed dramatically and express a complete shift in expressed utility. Cars are the classic example of irrational buying behavior: the utility you associate with a car is often more a function of your desire to express style and status than a function of its ability to get you from A to B. We have a long tradition in that. DriveNow is putting that long-learnt behavior on its head: The car is reduced to its core function and all non-core features that make ownership so desirable are obsolete.

The paradigm shift from ownership to access is enabled through digital technologies. But it is not only happening because it is technically possible but because people are incorporating the possibilities that come with the omnipresence of digital technologies to their reasoning and their values systems.

The notable thing about spotify is not the availability of music online but the willingness of people to give up ownership in something they are emotional involved with.

We are not in the post-digital era.

As I’ve stated we may be in the post-connect era. We may be in the post-digitization era. We created all the technical infrastructure and moved all suitable concepts to that infrastructure. But we are going to see more and more paradigm-shifts like the one described above. And each and every of these paradigm shifts will change the game big time. I am absolutely certain that we have no clue today, what tomorrw’s paradigm-shifts may look like. To me my preference for ownership in music in the past only became clear to me when I started to consider giving it up. And I am absolutely certain that I will go through that experience in many other aspects of my day-to-day life.

I refuse to call out the post digital-era. The truly exciting times are still ahead of us.

I had the opportunity to spend the last week in Silicon Valley. One evening, when I left the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, I met a woman in the staircase. She and her friends had come from M.I.T. to kick off their venture in the valley. I asked her the standard ‘what do you do’ question and she replied: “Our company builds a facebook based [put business secret here]. We have pivoted already!”

Let’s get this straight: “We have pivoted already!”  was part of her punch line for the venture. She said that with pride and with a smile.

Obviously she thought that at least one pivot lies on every start-up’s path to success and that already having come to that point was a big achievement. To her pivoting did not have the notion of something reality may force you to do. To her having completed a pivot was a badge of honor and a clear sign of doing things right.

Pivoting has become a popular buzz word in the past years. From my understanding its recent popularity comes largely from the Lean Startup movement. I like how Chris Dixon describes pivoting: “You aren’t throwing away what you’ve learned or the good things you’ve built. You are keeping your strong leg grounded and adjusting your weak leg to move in a new direction.”

I think it makes great sense to view a pivot as something that you inevitably run into as a founder. It certainly is possible to start a successful business without a pivot on the way. But to me that sounds like the rare exception, not the rule. In a next blog post I will compile a collection of now famous companies that pivoted in an early stage.

If founders see a pivot as something positive that will have a very important consequence: They will be on the lookout for opportunities to pivot. It will keep them much more open to market feedback and constantly challenging their own plans.

Of course I am not saying that you should pivot just for the sake of it. But from my experience founders’ tendency to fall in love with their own ideas (that’s a great thing: it makes you start your business in first place) combined with a good bit of Confirmation Bias are such strong forces that I see a stronger risk to under-pivot than to over-pivot.

The episode described at the beginning, I believe, showed me a cultural difference between Silicon Valley and my German home country. While in the Valley “having pivoted” obviously makes a good ingredient for a pitch for early stage businesses, in Germany “having to pivot” will likely be seen as a consequence of not having done your market research right before you started. It’s time to get rid of that attitude. Market research never works for innovative products.

Looking at the people that I enjoyed working with the most so far, I come to realize that they have a very diverse collection of backgrounds, skills and characters. However, there is one thing that they all have in common: I call it the obstacle-embracing personality.

Let me try to describe to you what this trait is. Consider you are sitting down with your tech lead to discuss the implementation of your next product or feature. Consider that this product/feature is already well specified from a functional point of view. I claim that in most cases 95% of the actual implementation is pretty straight-forward and you will develop a pretty good idea of what needs to be done right away. Those 95% of the job are a mere routine for a good tech-guy. I am not saying that everyone can do that part of the job. It requires strong skills and hard work as well. What I am saying though is: what sets good people apart is how they communicate about the remaining 5%, the tricky bits of the job, already in an early phase. And this holds true  not only for tech people but for practically anyone involved in your ventures advancement.

I find it extremely rewarding to work with people that embrace the obstacles that they see on the way. Great people try to get a feel for the tricky bits awaiting them right away. They put the concept upside down and turn the knife in the wound. They try to make worst case assumptions and try to find the points of the concept that begin to fall apart under pressure. They try to identify critical co-dependencies and point to likely sources of failure. They push others and themselves out out of their comfort zone when they feel that critical questions are left unanswered. Sometimes people mistake this for being pessimistic and overly critical. I argue: It is the only way that leads to building something sound that has an edge to it. I also believe that the best people always welcome the challenges that are imposed on them by this approach. And I am sure that in the end it creates a more honest and more satisfying team spirit for everyone involved.

Sometimes though you will find that in the concept phase individuals or whole teams will just communicate on the ‘easy’ 95%. They only know answers, no questions. They will feel confident and enjoy the soothing effects of not having to see the obstacles on the way. Everyone can remain in his or her comfort-zone. No one plays the devils advocate and asks uneasy questions.

This behavior may have different causes. Some people just don’t see the obstacles they are going to face. That is often caused by a lack of experience and not a problem as such. You can make up for that by offering a more experienced sparring partner who points to the obstacles that are likely to occur. What is more critical is the kind of person who does not want to see the obstacles. The kind of person who denies the obstacles. These people come with a solve-that-problem-when-I-run-into-it mentality that is both extremely frustrating and dangerous.

In the best case ignoring future obstacles in an early project phase will lead to false predictions about costs or required resources. In the worst case this denial will affect the assessment of the overall feasibility. Good people know that the tricky 5% are what makes or breaks a great product.

The willingness to identify all critical obstacles as early on as possible, to be brutally honest about them to yourself and to your team mates, and to have an intrinsic drive to find viable solutions to them is a must-have quality. It is a question of personality. Company culture and management can support or suppress it. But in the end it is a personal trait

I am not saying that plans must always be implemented according to all the obstacles anticipated. What I am saying though is that if someone deems an obstacle to be unimportant (for the time being) that should be a deliberate and informed decision and not one that is reached purely because of a lack of willingness to admit to the obstacles existence. To give you an example: if you are launching a product as a mere proto type for market testing it does not matter, if that prototype is scalable. But you have to have a sensibility for the obstacles that await you when having to scale it. If you do not have an honest answer on how to do that early on you either have the wrong team or an undoable product. Both is bad.

My point is: Try to surround yourself with people that embrace the tricky bits. People that ask and answer the questions that hurt. People that seek fulfilment in solving the hard bits. Beware of the people that see no bumps in the road coming and have a ready answer to everything.

In the end that is what entrepreneurship is all about: Solving the problems that others can’t.