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Comment by koonsolo | Hacker News Reader

"ZERO TO ONE is about how to build companies that create new things.", but then as an example uses: "The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine."

Maybe my history is not that good, but as far as I know Bill gates didn't build the first operating system, and when he bought 86-DOS, its success was mainly thanks to IBM. Same for Google, it wasn't the first search engine, it just improved on an existing concept.

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But they all made companies that made things. It has been a long time since any piece of software that was impactful could be built by one person.

And making the company is thus the important part. I would put "the next Linus Torvalds will not build an Operating System" in there too.

Secondly the next new thing has already been invented, it just has not been widely disseminated. James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but he embraced and extended it whilst building perhaps the first truly modern international company.

The point is that the first mature dominant players in those markets were Microsoft and Google. That's not to say that the dominant player can't be challenged, it's just that the next 100 billion dollar company will start in a new market with no mature dominant player (e.g. Facebook on social networks).

Altavista was dominant when Google entered the fray. MySpace was dominant when FB took off.

Whenever there is space for innovation and the incumbent does not react, a new player appears.

Facebook is my next to be toppled over bet. There is a huge space for innovation and FB is not nimble and quick to react nor it is particularly innovative on its own. Acquisitions and the social network barrier to entry protect FB, but they don't hold forever.

At some point the incumbent becomes so large and diversified that it can't be destroyed by a single competitor. Think IBM. You may come in and beat the incumbent company in the market that originally led to its success, but the incumbent still lives on in many other markets. The only way it is killed is by being consistently less fficient than the average entrant in many markets (i.e. Goliath falls, but there is no David to point to).

Facebook may reach that point before to long, although I'd guess they're not there yet.

IBM was beaten. They failed to evaluate the importance of the micro computer. Further, they failed to see the threat of micro computer-born CPUs to their business. The fact that IBM had enough momentum and clarividence to pivot into consulting is not relevant for this discussion. Today's IBM is not at all the IBM from the seventies.

Sounds kind of like how Kodak died out. It failed to anticipate the speed at which the market would shift into digital imaging and did a crappy job at entering other non-film markets (printers, cameras, etc). It's cash cow rapidly shrank to the point it couldn't fund viable entrants into new markets.

This is a bit circular, saying essentially that the winner is the innovator for winning.

The last mover?

I think he gave a talk where he actually explains that Zuck built the last social network, Gates, the last OS and so on. The point being that they built the last one that dominated everything else and became king.

here: http://youtu.be/Ni11-BjpWhM?t=4m34s

Your history is fine, but you should maybe work on your ability to distinguish between things that are "true" and "true, but irrelevant in this context"

Irrelevant how?

Is it irrelevant that the examples fail to back up the assertion because Peter Thiel is the one making it?

The 'big idea' expressed in this blurb is that it's 'easier to copy a model than to make something new.'

And the supporting arguments show off the opposite case just to associate the book with becoming the next industry defining billionaire.

Whoever wrote this blurb is either not thinking clearly, or is banking on readers to not think clearly.

There are much better example cases for that argument, but they aren't as flashy.

I think the confusion might be the definition of 'new'. Something can be new without being the first of its kind, neither Bill Gate's OS or Larry Page's search engine were the first of their kind, but I think in both cases they were the first of their kind that I used. They were first to the markets that mattered maybe?

Neither were the first of their kind that I (or millions of others) used.

I'd used both CP/M and Apple DOS before MSDOS - neither were exactly niche products back then. And Altavista was pretty well established as the best search engine before the Google upstart appeared.

As for social media, Myspace had 100 million users in 2006 and wasn't passed in popularity by Facebook until a couple of years later.

All of these things were entrants into well established markets which had (at the time) heavyweight incumbents. They've all become vastly more successful than those incumbents, but that's not because they were inventing or even popularising a concept. These weren't obscure concepts that these people took mainstream, and there have been/will be other hugely successful entrepreneurs in every single one of these areas at some point.

I didn't mean "that I used" to sound egotistical, more a proxy for more serious adoption. MySpace was mainstream, but Facebook was a more serious consideration because (at least as I remember it) it didn't allow the quagmire of horrific CSS crud MySpace did. It felt mature and accessible. I remember the 'social media marketing' of Heroes S1, where the kid characters had MySpace accounts and the politician had a Facebook account. Equally millions had used DOS before, but Windows got to people who didn't want to touch the command line. I can't speak to why that isn't also the perception for Apple's GUI OSes.

"More serious adoption" is relative. At the time that DOS, Google and Facebook went mainstream, their competitors would quite definitely have been classed as having serious adoption. And when the things that knock those off their pedestal (some, particularly DOS, were knocked off many years ago), the things that follow them may well have even more serious adoption.

My point is that the author's claim that "You won't get rich, famous and powerful by building a better mousetrap. You can only do that by being the one person who creates or popularises a whole new market segment" is simply wrong and has been shown to be wrong time and time again - including by the very people he's using as examples.

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