We define Experimentation as the implementation of the Lean Startup methodology of testing assumptions and constantly experimenting with controlled r… - Salim Ismail

Ronald Coase won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics for his theory that larger companies do better because they aggregate assets under one roof and, as a result, enjoy lower transaction costs. Two decades later, the reach delivered by the information revolution has negated the need to aggregate assets in the first place.

One reason for this debacle, according to Dan Colussy, who drove Iridium's buyout in 2000, was the company's refusal to update business assumptions. "The Iridium business plan was locked in place twelve years before the system became operational," he recalls. That's a long time, long enough that it was almost impossible to predict where the state of the art in digital communications would be by the time the satellite system was at last in place. We thus label this an Iridium Moment — using linear tools and the trends of the past to predict an accelerating future.

According to entrepreneur Chris Dixon, the most important change for entrepreneurs versus a decade ago is the ratio of reach to capital. Today, the reach of a startup is 100x larger, while the capital needed is one tenth that of a decade ago — a thousandfold improvement in just ten years.