Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future · chapter 1 · id zero-to-one-c1-01-every-moment-in-business-happe

“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system, the next Larry Page will not make a search engine, the next Mark Zuckerberg will not create a social network.”

contestedconfidence: high⚠ extracted by pipeline, re-audit pending

Receipts

Golder & Tellis (1993), Journal of Marketing Researchpaywalled — manual check queued

Market pioneers failed 47% of the time. Long-lived market share leadership for pioneers was supported in only 4 of 50 product categories. Early market leaders entered an average of 13 years after pioneers.

Kellogg School of Management -- Second-Mover Advantagesource alive

Pioneers outperformed late movers in only 15 of 50 product categories. Imitation costs are approximately two-thirds of pioneer development costs. Google was not the first search engine, Apple was not the first mobile device maker.

Louis Gudema -- Zero to Some: A Critique of Zero to Onesource alive

Bill Gates bought DOS from another developer. Google competed among existing search engines. Facebook followed CompuServe, AOL, Friendster, Classmates, and MySpace. Thiel's own exemplars were second-movers who improved on existing categories.

This claim is a stable, citable object. If you can falsify a verdict, tell us — corrections are loud here.