Thread by @balajis

Some of the greatest turnarounds in history.

National
Meiji Restoration, 1868
Singapore, 1965
Boluan Fanzheng, 1978
Estonia, 1991
Manmohan Singh, 1991

Tech
Andy Grove, 1986
Steve Jobs, 1996
Jeff Bezos, 2001
Elon Musk, 2008
Mark Zuckerberg, 2012
Satya Nadella, 2014

https://twitter.com/MacaesBruno/status/1267080866003595265

The Japanese knew they were behind the great Western powers...Figures like Shimazu Nariakira concluded that "if we take the initiative, we can dominate; if we do not, we will be dominated", leading Japan to "throw open its doors to foreign technology."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Res…

Fifty years ago Singapore became an independent state, after leaving the short-lived Malaysian Federation. With no natural resources, just how did this tiny country go from swamp to one of the region's leading economies?
bbc.com/news/magazine-…

Boluan Fanzheng...was a period in the history of People's Republic of China during which Deng Xiaoping, then paramount leader of China, led a far-reaching program attempting to correct the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boluan_Fa…

When Gorbachev pulled the Soviets out of Estonia in 1991, Ilves asked himself a simple question about the future of a country that had been brutally occupied by its eastern neighbor for a half-century.

"What do we have?"...

His answer was...technology.
theguardian.com/world/2016/apr…

Manmohan Singh's 1991 Budget
The day that changed India forever

…a bland statement to usher in a radical transformation of Indian enterprise and open up a whole new future for Indian entrepreneurs. The statement made a bonfire of all licensing controls.
thehindu.com/business/Econo…

What do you do when you wake up one day and realize that reality has changed, and you will either change with it or perish? Here’s one story of someone who did it successfully: Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel Corp.
fs.blog/2016/08/andy-g…

In 1997, Apple...had just cut a third of its work force, and it was about 90 days from going broke, Apple’s late co-founder, Steve Jobs, later said.

On [8/2/2018], Apple became the first publicly traded American company to be worth more than $1 trillion
nytimes.com/2018/08/02/tec…

Once the so-called dot-com bubble burst around 2000, things looked especially bad for Amazon and other early internet firms like it...the company was alarmingly close to joining the ranks of countless others that failed around this time...
onlinebusiness.northeastern.edu/blog/how-amazo…

Elon Musk says his companies SpaceX and Tesla are both still alive only "by the skin of their teeth".

The entrepreneur told an audience at the South by South West (SXSW) conference that both companies almost went bankrupt in 2008.
bbc.com/news/business-…

The incredible part is the sheer speed with which Facebook (FB) has gone from being the underdog to being one of the most dominant players in mobile advertising, and in mobile media as a whole. And the way it did that has some lessons for media companies.
archive.is/Mmc9I

Microsoft Windows 8 had been a disaster. Microsoft employees were constantly battling behind the scenes for supremacy. And all the while, consumers and developers alike were losing the faith.

Times change.
businessinsider.com/the-rise-of-mi…