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

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO CONVENTION
How must you see the world if you don’t believe in secrets? You’d have to
believe we’ve already solved all great questions. If today’s conventions are
correct, we can afford to be smug and complacent: “God’s in His heaven, All’s
right with the world.”
For example, a world without secrets would enjoy a perfect understanding of
justice. Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people
recognize early on: in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only
when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust. At first, only a small minority of
abolitionists knew that slavery was evil; that view has rightly become
conventional, but it was still a secret in the early 19th century. To say that there
are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden
injustices.
In economics, disbelief in secrets leads to faith in efficient markets. But the
existence of financial bubbles shows that markets can have extraordinary
inefficiencies. (And the more people believe in efficiency, the bigger the bubbles
get.) In 1999, nobody wanted to believe that the internet was irrationally
overvalued. The same was true of housing in 2005: Fed chairman Alan
Greenspan had to acknowledge some “signs of froth in local markets” but stated
that “a bubble in home prices for the nation as a whole does not appear likely.”
The market reflected all knowable information and couldn’t be questioned. Then
home prices fell across the country, and the financial crisis of 2008 wiped out
trillions. The future turned out to hold many secrets that economists could not
make vanish simply by ignoring them.
What happens when a company stops believing in secrets? The sad decline of
Hewlett-Packard provides a cautionary tale. In 1990, the company was worth $9
billion. Then came a decade of invention. In 1991, HP released the DeskJet
500C, the world’s first affordable color printer. In 1993, it launched the
OmniBook, one of the first “superportable” laptops. The next year, HP released
the OfficeJet, the world’s first all-in-one printer/fax/copier. This relentless
product expansion paid off: by mid-2000, HP was worth $135 billion.
But starting in late 1999, when HP introduced a new branding campaign
around the imperative to “invent,” it stopped inventing things. In 2001, the
company launched HP Services, a glorified consulting and support shop. In