We don’t know of a single start-up that succeeded without starting out as single-threaded. That focus is the key to beating larger competitors in the… - Reid Hoffman

When we first started raising money in 1997, we thought we’d be mostly streaming in 5 years,” Hastings told us when he visited our Blitzscaling class at Stanford. “In 2002, we had no streaming. So we thought that by 2007, it would be half our business. In 2007, we were still nowhere. So we made the same prediction. And this time we were wrong the other way — by 2012, streaming was 60% of our business.” It may have taken longer than Hastings expected, but Moore’s Law eventually came through for him.

Despite all the chaos, and the inefficiency of manufacturing and shipping in small batches, Zara’s gross margins continue to exceed those of its competitors H&M (55 percent) and Gap (29 percent). That’s because all that inefficiency incurred in the pursuit of speed allows Zara to avoid one of the biggest drags on gross margin for almost any apparel company — overstock of designs that failed to sell. Ortega devised this model when he was sixteen years old — don’t order inventory and hope it sells; instead, figure out what people want, and then make it.

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