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

THE ENGINEERING QUESTION
A great technology company should have proprietary technology an order of
magnitude better than its nearest substitute. But cleantech companies rarely
produced 2x, let alone 10x, improvements. Sometimes their offerings were
actually worse than the products they sought to replace. Solyndra developed
novel, cylindrical solar cells, but to a first approximation, cylindrical cells are
only 1 / π
as efficient as flat ones—they simply don’t receive as much direct
sunlight. The company tried to correct for this deficiency by using mirrors to
reflect more sunlight to hit the bottoms of the panels, but it’s hard to recover
from a radically inferior starting point.
Companies must strive for 10x better because merely incremental
improvements often end up meaning no improvement at all for the end user.
Suppose you develop a new wind turbine that’s 20% more efficient than any
existing technology—when you test it in the laboratory. That sounds good at
first, but the lab result won’t begin to compensate for the expenses and risks
faced by any new product in the real world. And even if your system really is
20% better on net for the customer who buys it, people are so used to
exaggerated claims that you’ll be met with skepticism when you try to sell it.
Only when your product is 10x better can you offer the customer transparent
superiority.