Entrepreneurs at disruptive startups see the world in precisely this way, paying heed to Peter Drucker’s famous dictum “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”7 Indeed, entrepreneurs perceive the focus on customers as a defining quality of startups as opposed to incumbents. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has remarked, “When [executives of other companies] are in the shower in the morning, they’re thinking about how they’re going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we’re thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.”
