“All happy companies are different: Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: They failed to escape competition.”
All Happy Companies Are Different
The closing lines of Peter Thiel’s Competition Is for Losers (Wall Street Journal Saturday Essay, September 12, 2014), adapted from Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (with Blake Masters, Crown Business, 2014). The book’s Chapter 3 carries the same title.
Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina with the observation that happy families are alike and unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way; Thiel inverts the form. What looks like “each company doing something unique” is, in his terms, each company having built a monopoly, defined earlier in the essay as “the kind of company that is so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute.” Failure, in the inverse, is uniform: companies that don’t escape competition all fail the same way.