This doesn't really contradict your point, but I was more thinking about the arc from 'small to huge', not the arc from 'huge to ginormous' -- after all, how di

This doesn't really contradict your point, but I was more thinking about the arc from 'small to huge', not the arc from 'huge to ginormous' -- after all, how did Vanguard become the leader in the space? Honda competed on price and efficiency to secure government industrial contracts; for Vanguard's first five years its only investors were institutional[^1], where their success laid much more in being a (massively successful) niche fund that no other firm offered than having any household success. Other commenters have argued that repeated success in an RFP environment comes from reputation (and thus word-of-mouth), but I think that's stretching too far from the original thrust of the article. [^1] I read this in a book but Wikipedia says that its first index fund in 1976, was available to individual investors, so I'm not 100% on this.