Critics outside of tech might be surprised to hear it, but many optimistic technologists believe that the mobile and social era of startups, and the subsequent reign of FAANG, fell short of tech’s tremendous potential. But optimists diverge from pessimists in their diagnosis of the problem. We attribute it to a failure of vision, rather than the value proposition of technology itself.

The 2010s era of tech was characterized by what Peter Thiel calls indefinite optimism. The indefinite optimist feels positively about the future, but doesn’t have a clear vision for how to get there. Indefinite optimists free ride on the inventiveness of definite optimists — those who have a clear vision for the future, and aim to build it.

In the 2000s, early pioneers of the consumer internet, cloud computing, data infrastructure, and smartphones precipitated a world where all humanity’s knowledge could be accessed, indexed, searched, mined, and machine learned; where people could connect effortlessly; and where new tools for science, culture, and commerce could be built upon the foundations they created. Steve Jobs – who resisted the temptation to release yet-another consumer mobile phone, and instead created an entirely new category of smartphone – is one of Thiel’s canonical examples of definite optimism. As Thiel and Blake Masters described it in Zero to One, Jobs led by his own vision and “change[d] the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others' successes.”