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>And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. Unless they are creating Twitter. And an article written before Facebook started would probably ha
by prof_hobart 12y ago
>And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network.
Unless they are creating Twitter. And an article written before Facebook started would probably have said "The next Tom Anderson won't create a social network"
Yes, every successful business will need to find what their particular unique niche is, and it certainly helps to be the first major player in a whole new area, but the reality is that at this macro level "Every moment in business" doesn't happen "only once". Most markets have plenty of space for multiple innovators making relatively minor tweaks to existing industries.
For instance, you could easily present Steve Jobs being "the next Bill Gates", and he certainly did well out of a company creating OSs (and the hardware to run them on, but at least with Macs, and potentially with iPhones/iPads, the OS was almost certainly the more important part).
- Haul4ss 12y agoI think his point is that the next hugely successful billionaire will not be creating a competitor to something that is already hugely successful today. That's not to say you can't make a comfortable living building a better mousetrap. It just means you won't be Gates or Zuckerberg. Of course, you could easily make the argument that Gates (for example) merely built a better mousetrap. It's not like Microsoft invented the operating system. Or the personal computer. Or word processing. Microsoft, through strategy, lots of hard work, and a little luck, happened to be doing just the right thing at just the right time.
- lrm242 12y agoWait, you mean like Elon Musk? The guy is not only competing against hugely successful incumbents, but he's doing it in parallel in two markets! Somewhat ironic given Musk and Thiel are cut from the same cloth. Thiel's book might be a fun read. Take from it what you want, but it certainly isn't gospel.
- adventured 12y agoOr Bezos in retailing. First he beat Barnes & Noble etc, then he beat Walmart and Target (and everyone else). All from a guy that hadn't spent a minute in retail previously. Both Bezos and Musk took advantage of an exception to what Thiel is talking about: inflection points in technology sometimes provide massive competitive openings that are better viewed as blue ocean because they're so different from the establishment.
- prof_hobart 12y agoI know that's his point. I just think that history has proven his point wrong. None of his examples - Zuckerberg, Gates, Brin or Page got rich out of creating a whole new concept - social media, OSs and search engines existed and were fairly successful things before any of those came along. They all got rich by a combination of building a better mousetrap, smart business moves and luck. And if someone else comes along and does any of those things (or any other existing business concept) far better than any of these people, or come up with a success enough differentiator in the the same general industry sector - like Jack Dorsey et al did with Twitter for example - they may well become wildly rich as well. Of course, the more established an industry sector is, the harder and harder it becomes to do something that is differentiating enough to allow you to become wildly rich from it. But there's countless examples across countless industries that show it's far from impossible. People still become hugely rich from innovations in banking, in retail and transport. And none of those are new industries.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]