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Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality.
Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.
As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.
The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse.
You can still visit the Bay Model in that Sausalito warehouse, but today it’s just a tourist attraction:
But U.S. households are saving almost nothing. And U.S. companies are letting cash pile up on their balance sheets without investing in new projects because they don’t have any concrete plans for the future.
When a big company makes an offer to acquire a successful startup, it almost always offers too much or too little: founders only sell when they have no more concrete visions for the company, in which case the acquirer probably overpaid; definite founders with robust plans don’t sell, which means the offer wasn’t high enough.
Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1.
The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.
