Perfection is not optional. - Peter Diamandis

The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak's Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson's supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a "small" request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first "charge-coupled device" (or CCD) — an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor — and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world's first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, "like a '70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,"5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images — a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak's roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then — a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight "When you demonstrate such a system," Sasson later said, "that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How'd you do this? How'd you make that work? I didn't get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?"6 I

Quirky, Airbnb, and Uber are great examples of entrepreneurs taking advantage of the expanding scale of exponential impact. They have created billion-dollar companies in record time. They are the absolute inverse of everything we believed was true about scaling up a capital-intensive businesses. For most of the twentieth century, scaling up such businesses required massive investments and time. Adding workforce, constructing buildings, developing vastly new product suites — no wonder implementation strategies stretched years into decades. It wasn't unusual for a board of directors to "bet the company" on a new and extremely expensive direction whose outcome would remain unknown until long after most of those board members retired. That was then.

Market segmentation matters. "It's critical to craft your message for a specific audience,"