Peter Thiel draws a <i>binary</i> distinction between monopolies which dominate a market and competitive commodity businesses.  In such a <i>binary</i> model, the only businesses that can have startup [in the Silicon Valley sense] type growth are monopolies.<p>Of course in a binary model, &quot;monopoly&quot; and &quot;commodity&quot; get stretched to cover a lot of grey flux between the poles. The important thing is which half of the spectrum a company is on, not if the company is on the absolute end of the side with all the potential.<p>This isn&#x27;t to say that this is the perfect state of the world, only that there is some context around the way the terms of used...in this case, it&#x27;s a sketch, or a diagram, or a schematic rather than a documentary photograph.