Photo by suradeach saetang
Just like in the fashion world, fads come and go in innovation. If you want to know where the next bubble is forming, watch the Super Bowl.
In 2000, more than a dozen internet startups, like Pets.com, bought Super Bowl ad space. Within a year or two, most of them were gone, having burned through venture capital faster than they could build a revenue model. The dot-com bubble burst, and billions of dollars evaporated.
In 2022, it was crypto’s turn. FTX, Coinbase, Crypto.com—there were so many crypto ads that marketing experts dubbed it the “Crypto Bowl.” FTX’s ad featured comedian Larry David telling viewers not to miss out. Within ten months, FTX was bankrupt and its founder was facing federal fraud charges. The following year, crypto companies had zero representation at the Super Bowl. Not a single ad.
Then, this past February, nearly a quarter of all Super Bowl commercials were either promoting AI tools or created using AI. If the pattern holds, that should give us pause.
To be clear: AI technology is real, just as the internet was real in 2000 and blockchain has real applications today. The point is that this is what a gold rush looks like. And in a gold rush, most of the prospectors go broke.
The Gold Rush Problem#
In the nineteenth century, when gold was discovered in California, people started pouring in. 300,000 of them. That’s exactly what happens every time a technology captures the world’s imagination. Capital floods in. Talent floods in. Attention floods in. And suddenly, everyone is building the same thing. Every start-up pitches itself as “AI-powered.” Every VC wants to fund the next AI play. Every corporation scrambles to prove it has an AI strategy.
This is not a new pattern. It is, in fact, one of the most predictable dynamics in the innovation economy. The technology at the center of the hype cycle is usually legitimate. The problem is that the economics of a stampede make it nearly impossible for most participants to win. It’s simple supply and demand. In the California gold rush, there was real gold to be found. But with 300,000 people competing for it, most lost out.
The people who reliably profit from a gold rush are not the ones panning for gold. They are the ones selling picks and shovels.
The Real Cost: What Doesn’t Get Built#
The real damage of a gold rush isn’t just the money lost by the players inside it. It is the innovation that never happens outside of it.
When capital and attention flow in one direction, everything else starves. Innovators working on hard, unglamorous problems, especially in hardware, struggle to get meetings with investors. Promising innovation gets passed over simply because it does not fit the dominant narrative.
This is the hidden cost of the gold rush. Not the spectacular failures inside the bubble, but the transformative ideas that never receive funding and never make it to market because everyone was too busy chasing the shiny thing.
The Revolution Nobody Noticed#
The most successful, impactful innovations often fly under the radar. Consider what happened during the dot-com gold rush in the late 1990s. While the dot-com bubble consumed every dollar and headline, a quiet revolution was unfolding in telecommunications. Engineers developed a technique called wavelength-division multiplexing—a method of sending multiple signals through a single fiber-optic cable using different wavelengths of light. The name alone is enough to put most people to sleep. There definitely weren’t any Super Bowl ads about it.
But with wavelength-division multiplexing, the capacity of a single fiber strand went from carrying a handful of signals to carrying thousands. It killed long-distance phone charges and made the modern internet possible. And almost nobody outside the telecom industry has ever heard of it.
While the world was throwing money at Pets.com, the real transformation was happening in the background—no hype cycle, no relentless media coverage, no celebrity endorsements. Just engineers solving a brutally hard problem that changed everything.
What Are You Not Seeing?#
This brings us to the question that matters most for anyone serious about innovation: while the entire world stares at AI, what is the wavelength-division multiplexing of right now?
What is the quiet, unglamorous breakthrough happening in a lab or a garage somewhere that will reshape an entire industry while no one is watching? Because it’s out there. It always is.
Recognizing the unglamorous but revolutionary breakthroughs is a skill. It requires understanding problems deeply enough that when a new solution appears, you can trace the downstream implications before the rest of the world catches on.
The gold rush will always be there. There will always be a hot technology and a crowd of smart people chasing the same opportunity. The question is not whether you can see what everyone else sees. Anyone can spot a gold rush. The question is whether you can see what everyone else is missing because of it.