Building Infrastructure

A sure fire way of making something that makes money is to build infrastructure. If you build infrastructure for an industry and that industry grows, you will have all the benefits of: growing with the industry, scaling with the industry, and more demand being fed into a business/process that presumably works.

So ask yourself:

• what infrastructure needs to be built?
• What industry which, if it had better infrastructure, could work a lot better?
• What would it take to go build that infrastructure?

Infrastructure is always expensive and risky because you are building for an industry that isn’t necessarily big now but will hopefully be much bigger in the future. Again, you are growing alongside the industry and (ideally) making the industry grow faster because you are building useful infrastructure.

Whether it’s railroads, oil pipelines, or cloud services, infrastructure is expensive but when it succeeds the returns are near limitless. Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Rockeffeler are all examples of leaders of companies who created unimaginable levels of wealth by building infrastructure that is now taken for granted.