Gwern’s Review of “The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T” (2012)
One of the arguments that the reviewer makes is that breakout success looks unattractive from an vc point of view and are thus hard to predict(category killers like Microsoft&#x2F;not the first os, Facebook&#x2F;not the first social media and google&#x2F;~20th search engine).<p>If I’m understanding him correctly, he seems to suggest that much of success can be attributed to luck. That is, being at the right place at the right time.<p>But if being lucky means all the stars align and the market takes off, such as storage cost drops to enable Dropbox, or processing power per dollar drops to enable more expensive compute, really all players in the industry are able to take advantage of it. Therefore it doesn’t explain why Facebook was the one and not MySpace.<p>In my opinion, being a category killers comes down to having an revolutionary product that truly separates you from the pack as well as be at the right place at the right time. Google pagerank probably was the 10x improvement AND they had good timing. On the same line, Dropbox just worked at a time storage and bandwidth cost was rapidly decreasing and was 10x better than the competition.<p>Of course, there is another category of category killers that didn’t have any competitors to come before it. And that is likely because from an investment perspective, it looked so unfavorable no one even bothered.<p>As such, one offs such as Musk who are willing to act irrationally by funding the likes of SpaceX (original goal is to increase public interest in space) and Tesla created those category killers.<p>It’s more than simply luck.<p>Just my two cents.