Mark Zuckerberg says big companies fumble two thirds of opportunities because they move slowly and doubt new ideas. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all had social networking versions but killed them. Startups win because they have conviction and speed.
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There may be some larger company that has some distribution advantage, but like, I don't know, large companies are slow and they lack conviction. One of the kind of things that I've thought about from time to time is like, why was it the case that we were able to build Facebook and that some other company didn't? Right? It wasn't like it was a super novel idea, right? It's, I mean there was Friendster before there was MySpace, there's all this stuff. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, they all like had versions of it. Why didn't they do it? It's not that they had a lack of talent, right? I mean we were like a ragtag group of children, right? It's like, and they had like all these like serious, you know, engineers. Serious engineers and like serious infrastructure. And so I kind of think the reason is because people doubt new ideas before they come to fruition, right? So the narrative with social networking is like, ah, just like this college kid thing. It's like, okay, fine, maybe not college kids, but it's probably a fad. Oh, okay, maybe it seems like it's going to be around for a while, but it's probably not going to make money. Oh, it's making money, but the switch to mobile is going to be pretty hard. And then it's like, okay. By the time we figured that out it was too late for anyone. The companies had lost their advantage. And so what was the issue? I don't know. There's probably some team buried deep inside those companies that believed in it and probably some VP person who is like, eh, that's probably not the biggest priority and just pour some, I don't know, sand in the gears or whatever analogy you want. Even for the things that look like they belong to large companies as opportunities because they have a big distribution advantage, I would guess that big companies are going to fumble two thirds of those, right? And then there are all these things where there is not an apparent big advantage because it plugs into an existing distribution channel and those are just kind of free.
