todo el mundo en tu compañía debería ser diferente de la misma manera, una tribu de personas afines ferozmente entregadas a la misión de la compañía. - Peter Thiel

In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business. Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. 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.

Sequencing markets correctly is underrated, and it takes discipline to expand gradually. The most successful companies make the core progression — to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets — a part of their founding narrative.

But this “spray and pray” approach usually produces an entire portfolio of flops, with no hits at all. This is because venture returns don’t follow a normal distribution overall. Rather, they follow a power law: a small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.