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

American thinking ever since 1982, when a long bull market began and finance
eclipsed engineering as the way to approach the future. To an indefinite optimist,
the future will be better, but he doesn’t know how exactly, so he won’t make any
specific plans. He expects to profit from the future but sees no reason to design it
concretely.
Instead of working for years to build a new product, indefinite optimists
rearrange already-invented ones. Bankers make money by rearranging the capital
structures of already existing companies. Lawyers resolve disputes over old
things or help other people structure their affairs. And private equity investors
and management consultants don’t start new businesses; they squeeze extra
efficiency from old ones with incessant procedural optimizations. It’s no surprise
that these fields all attract disproportionate numbers of high-achieving Ivy
League optionality chasers; what could be a more appropriate reward for two
decades of résumé-building than a seemingly elite, process-oriented career that
promises to “keep options open”?
Recent graduates’ parents often cheer them on the established path. The
strange history of the Baby Boom produced a generation of indefinite optimists
so used to effortless progress that they feel entitled to it. Whether you were born
in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of
your life, and it had nothing to do with you. Technological advance seemed to
accelerate automatically, so the Boomers grew up with great expectations but
few specific plans for how to fulfill them. Then, when technological progress
stalled in the 1970s, increasing income inequality came to the rescue of the most
elite Boomers. Every year of adulthood continued to get automatically better and
better for the rich and successful. The rest of their generation was left behind,
but the wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to
question their naïve optimism. Since tracked careers worked for them, they can’t
imagine that they won’t work for their kids, too.
Malcolm Gladwell says you can’t understand Bill Gates’s success without
understanding his fortunate personal context: he grew up in a good family, went
to a private school equipped with a computer lab, and counted Paul Allen as a
childhood friend. But perhaps you can’t understand Malcolm Gladwell without
understanding his historical context as a Boomer (born in 1963). When Baby
Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is
successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as
determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own
preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate
the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first
appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made