Zero to One_ Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future ( PDFDrive )

EXTENDING THE FOUNDING
Bob Dylan has said that he who is not busy being born is busy dying. If he’s
right, being born doesn’t happen at just one moment—you might even continue
to do it somehow, poetically at least. The founding moment of a company,
however, really does happen just once: only at the very start do you have the
opportunity to set the rules that will align people toward the creation of value in
the future.
The most valuable kind of company maintains an openness to invention that is
most characteristic of beginnings. This leads to a second, less obvious
understanding of the founding: it lasts as long as a company is creating new
things, and it ends when creation stops. If you get the founding moment right,
you can do more than create a valuable company: you can steer its distant future
toward the creation of new things instead of the stewardship of inherited success.
You might even extend its founding indefinitely.