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

FOUNDATIONS
EVERY GREAT COMPANY is unique, but there are a few things that every business must get
right at the beginning. I stress this so often that friends have teasingly nicknamed
it “Thiel’s law”: a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
Beginnings are special. They are qualitatively different from all that comes
afterward. This was true 13.8 billion years ago, at the founding of our cosmos: in
the earliest microseconds of its existence, the universe expanded by a factor of
10 30 —a million trillion trillion. As cosmogonic epochs came and went in those
first few moments, the very laws of physics were different from those we know
today.
It was also true 227 years ago at the founding of our country: fundamental
questions were open for debate by the Framers during the few months they spent
together at the Constitutional Convention. How much power should the central
government have? How should representation in Congress be apportioned?
Whatever your views on the compromises reached that summer in Philadelphia,
they’ve been hard to change ever since: after ratifying the Bill of Rights in 1791,
we’ve amended the Constitution only 17 times. Today, California has the same
representation in the Senate as Alaska, even though it has more than 50 times as
many people. Maybe that’s a feature, not a bug. But we’re probably stuck with it
as long as the United States exists. Another constitutional convention is unlikely;
today we debate only smaller questions.
Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if
you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very
hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of
bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder, your first
job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a
flawed foundation.