However, I think the distribution of success is often very different from the distribution of impact, because of replacement effects. If Facebook hadn’t become the leading social network, then MySpace would have. If not Google, then Yahoo. If not Newton, then Leibniz (and if Newton, then Leibniz anyway).
I think this is less true for startups than for scientific discoveries, because of bad Nash equilibrium stemming from founder effects. The objective which Google is maximising might not be concave. It might have many peaks, and which you reach might be quite arbitrarily determined. Yet the peaks might have very different consequences when you have a billion users.
For lack of a concrete example… suppose a webapp W uses feature x, and this influences which audience uses the app. Then, once W has scaled and depend on that audience for substantial profit they can’t easily change x. (It might be that changing x to y wouldn’t decrease profit, but just not increase it.) Yet, had they initially used y instead of x, they could have grown just as big, but they would have had a different audience. Moreover, because of network effects and returns to scale, it might not be possible for a rivalling company to build their own webapp which is basically the same thing but with y instead.
I’m not sure how much to believe in this without concrete examples (the ones which come to mind are mostly pretty trivial, like Yahoo having a cluttered homepage and Google having a minimalist one, or MacOS being based on Unix).
Maybe Twitter is an example? I can easily picture it having a very different format. Still, I’m not particularly swayed by that.
I think this is less true for startups than for scientific discoveries, because of bad Nash equilibrium stemming from founder effects. The objective which Google is maximising might not be concave. It might have many peaks, and which you reach might be quite arbitrarily determined. Yet the peaks might have very different consequences when you have a billion users.
For lack of a concrete example… suppose a webapp W uses feature x, and this influences which audience uses the app. Then, once W has scaled and depend on that audience for substantial profit they can’t easily change x. (It might be that changing x to y wouldn’t decrease profit, but just not increase it.) Yet, had they initially used y instead of x, they could have grown just as big, but they would have had a different audience. Moreover, because of network effects and returns to scale, it might not be possible for a rivalling company to build their own webapp which is basically the same thing but with y instead.
I’m not sure how much to believe in this without concrete examples (the ones which come to mind are mostly pretty trivial, like Yahoo having a cluttered homepage and Google having a minimalist one, or MacOS being based on Unix).
Maybe Twitter is an example? I can easily picture it having a very different format. Still, I’m not particularly swayed by that.