Zero to One

By definition, the future is a place where things are different from the present. In this sense, the mere passing of time doesn't constitute for the arrival of the future. In order to get to the future, the things has to change. This change might take 5 years to get to your doorstep (think of some Neuralink-style brain-computer interfaces); if so, then that means the future is 5 years away. This change might take 100 years to be in your reach (think of some severe global event causing a slowdown in the rate of the scientific and the technological progress, and you don't get your Neuralink for a long time), then, the future is 100 years away. Regardless of how long it takes, the constant thing is, the future defines itself as something different from the present.

Such an understanding of the future immediately puts it in a conflict dyad with the present.

In this framing, change emerges from new understandings of the material world gained through the scientific process and the techniques these insights enable for the human societies. Scientists bulldoze through the unknown and increase the diameter of the known area against the outer area of the unknown. Technologists invent new tools using the new scientific information and dissipate these tools into the human society. New tools enable new human behavior, change the old behavior, and make the old behavior obsolete and abandoned. In such a view, the change in human behavior fueled by technology is something that comes from outside of whatever the local politics, culture, and religion intends to command with regards to the human behavior. And because the change comes from outside of those, those things fail at containing and constraining it.

The role of the tech entrepreneur is this: bringing the future into the present. The future is going to arrive, but the tech entrepreneurs of the Silicon Valley make it arrive faster. The tech entrepreneur uses the new horizons in technique to devise new products and services. A few examples: the advances in electronics that made chips, capacitors, batteries, transformers, smaller and cheaper allowed Apple to disrupt the existing server computer market by introducing the household-type computer. The advances in disk storage, memory technology, processor speeds allowed Microsoft to distribute larger and more capable personal computer operating systems. Email protocol made the snail mail obsolete. Faster internet speeds made human social behavior to migrate to the world of computer networks. And now OpenAI and other companies, using the new techniques in large language models, are making large swaths of lazy girl jobs obsolete, while blockchain-based distributed crypto currency systems like BTC and XMR are taking the economic activity out of the outdated state structures.

The future is wild, offensive and exciting. The future is different.

The change that brings about the future to the present is mostly fueled by vertical progress. Vertical progress is a step change in doing things, OR, inventing new tools that enable humans to do altogether novel things. Vertical progress is the invention of wireless radio by Tesla and Marconi, that does away with the telegraph wires. Vertical progress is the invention of "assembly line production" in automobile factories by Henry Ford, which changed the existing paradigm of production. Vertical progress is Apple's first iPhone, which put an internet-connected computer in everyone's pocket, changing the way a person interacts with the information age. Vertical progress is the creation of a feasible and scalable product, which did not exist before, and which, when used, allows for novel human actions.

Horizontal progress, is the scaling of the vertical progress. It is the distribution of the wealth and riches that the vertical progress creates, to a large number of customers and users. Vertical progress is Jeff Bezos starting Amazon.com which moves shopping to a new realm (the internet), and horizontal progress is Amazon's entry into European, Middle Eastern, or Southeast Asian market. Horizontal progress is, once properly turned into a product, covering the whole world with fiber optic undersea cables so that billions of people can experience high speed internet. Another horizontal progress is SpaceX's making the satellite communication and reaching the Earth's orbit economically feasible, then turning these vertical progress into global satellite internet coverage.

Vertical progress creates new economical value by allowing novel human action to take place, and horizontal progress turns these novel human actions into developed markets with an abundance of high quality and easily available products.

In this analysis of the technological progress, the dashing tech startup founder should FIRST focus on creating the vertical progress with his company. The primacy should be on the vertical progress, because, without it, there wouldn't be (and will not be) wealth for the horizontal progress to distribute. The fountainhead of betterment of the human material condition is the vertical progress. Apart from this perhaps faux-humanistic motivation, another perhaps more compelling motivation for the startup founder is that the returns on investment for the entrepreneur on vertical progress simply dwarves the ones that are available for the horizontal progress. Creating a market by inventing the novel human action enabling product, by default, gives the company that creates it, an edge in also monopolizing the market and enjoying great monopoly profits (ex: Google and the internet search market).

So, the mission statement of the tech entrepreneur is bringing the future into the present, by changing some big or small subset of the current human behavior, by offering technological products and services at scale, which themselves are enabled by the newly captured horizons in the technique.

What kind of a human social organization scheme is best suited for such a mission statement? It is a group of highly smart and technologically capable founders (no more than 5 individuals), with a shared goal and a shared belief in the primacy of their goal, taking actions with a short-/medium-/long-term view of their operations. It is the startup scheme of social organization that brings the future to the present.

Big corpos which are lethargic under their own weight, very busy in dealing with their day-to-day operations and maintaining their existing lines of products and services, are simply unable to see the coming technological changes in the horizon, OR, even if they can see that, they are unable to act on such understandings.

Government departments (lol) have all the disadvantages that big corpos have, but in addition, they also have the corruption issues, the tendency of anti-meritocratic selection of their personnel, and the detrimental effect of a steady paycheck irrespective of their operational performance. Governments are simply filled with people who do not understand not only the new technology, but also the technology of the past 10 years. They are cushy and secure job positions which do not have to deal with the current market's performance, reliability and cost requirements – the educational ministry and its big army of officers get paid no matter how bad the country's education system.

Only startups have the manpower, the vitality, and the intelligence required for bringing the future into the present. Only startups allow and foster the actions of the will of the founder, who has a burning heart in his chest, and a larger-than-life ambitions for his own life in his mind.

The mission statement of the entrepreneur is to bring the future into the present. The future is a place where the human action is different from the present, fueled by new products and services that are born out of vertical progress. And the human organization scheme that allows the founding fathers of a new company to reach into that future and bring it into the present is the form of a tech startup.

Creation of economical value is not enough, the creator of this new economical value has to capture some of the value he creates, in order to perpetuate his company's day-to-day operations. A tech startup is different from existing companies in the sense that the former aims for a total domination of the markets they create.

The markets in which competing companies exist have small profit margins. A new entrant to such markets increase the supply of the product that satisfies a certain human need, driving the prices lower, which, in turn dwindling the profits that made the entrant motivated to enter that market in the first place. This makes the entrant to pay low-wages to their workers, make them work long and inelastic hours, and make the whole business experience something similar to that of a brute trying to survive in a dangerous jungle. The value that competing companies create evaporate in the heat of their competition, returning back into the entrant's treasury in ever decreasing amounts. In this sense, entering into a competitive market is a loser's errand at worst and a let-down experience at best.

Monopolies, on the other hand, are companies that enjoy secure market dominance positions and large profit margins. Such earnings allow them to pay better salaries to their employees, allow them to work elastic hours, and have better amenities in the workplace. (For the sake of this discussion, we assume the monopoly reaches its position by the superiority of its product and its service, not by government favors. Google and its monopoly position in the search market is such an example.)

Monopoly profits also allow the company that earns them to shift its gaze from the dirt ground and into the horizon of technical possibilities, allowing it to foresee, prepare and even bring about the new vertical progresses. Google's large profits allow it to fund its new ventures like the Android mobile device operating system, the Waymo self-driving taxi services, the cloud office productivity suites, the GMail, etc. If Google were not able to generate monopoly profits, then, it wouldn't have cash to throw into such side ventures, and people would have to let go of the productivity boost that Google's side venture products and services creates for them.

In short, monopoly profits make the work environment more humane, allow the company to have a lower time preference, and allow the company keep producing new products and services which keep on bringing the ever farther future horizons into the present.