Facebook hasn't created one business. It has constantly reinvented itself, one S curve after another.
Here's their story 🧵
First, Zuckerberg built TheFacebook just for Harvard students. That might have been luck or genius, but what came after that was genius.
When all the Harvard kids were there, the Ivy League students also wanted in. But they couldn't. So they REALLY wanted in
Once they were allowed in, the rest of college students wanted in.
One college students were in, all high school students wanted in.
Once HS students were in, their parents followed.
Suddenly everybody was there.
Early on FB was just a place where ppl shared pics of you drunk the night before. Very viral "OH MY GOD, somebody tagged me on a picture from yesterday on TheFacebook? I NEED TO SEE IT!"
But it had an invisible asymptote, a limit for growth:
How frequently do you go out?
So FB needed more content to pass this invisible asymptote. That's when they opened it up to other companies.
By allowing you to harvest your FarmVille on FB, they created a huge stream of content, which got ppl to come back all the time.
Fb has kept reinventing its business over and over to pass new invisible asymptotes.
Moving from the wall to the feed
A huge push to be mobile native
Buying Instagram
Buying Onavo to steal features from competitors like Stories
Adding News...
It's hard enough to build one business.
To consistently build new ones on top of each other is otherworldly difficult. Few companies can do that well.
And that's why, like him or not, Zuckerberg, like Bezos or Jobs, are some of the most brilliant business minds of our time
S curves are everywhere. Learning to identify them is a superpower
They're how epidemics evolve
How memes spread
How investment unfold
How businesses grow
How muscles contract
How technology us adopted
How animation flows
How popcorn explodes
How ice melts
How water evaporates
How countries are formed
How magnets snap
How atoms spin
How transistors change their charge
How ppl get promoted
How they succeed
How they're fired
How they're born
How they die
We don't always recognize them because, depending on where we are on an S curve, it might not look like one.
It might look line a horizontal line
Or a vertical one
Or an oblique one
Or an exponential
Or a noisy surve
Amazon didn't create one business. It consistently reinvented itself, one S curve after another.
It knew how to identify invisible asymptotes and how to pre-empt them.
The 1st S curve was an online bookstore.
Now in retrospect it sounds trivial that they would move beyond that. But it wasn't.
How many online bookstores do you know that moved on from doing just that?
Bezos picked books because they benefitted from having millions of SKUs, ppl didn't need them immediately, and they weren't perishable. Internet had an advantage over physical locations for them.
Why are some Caribbean countries richer than others?Why do some islands speak one language, and others another?
Why are there still colonies there?
Why are there difference races in each?
Why is the Caribbean the way it is?
Thread 🧵
When the Spaniards arrived at the end of the 1400s, they were looking for riches. There were few in the Caribbean islands. So they didn't pay too much attention.
Eventually, they found silver on the Continent: in Mexico (Zacatecas) and Bolivia (Potosí).
They needed a way to transport all of that silver back to Spain. They transported the Mexican riches to Veracruz, and the Bolivian ones to Cartagena de Indias.
Why is Mexico so mountainous, and yet so populous?!
Why is it poorer than the US?
How was that influenced by Spanish colonization?
Why is Mexico the way it is today?
A thread 🧵
Ok what are those lights in the south, Mexico?
Isn't it impossible to have a big population in the smack middle of the mountains?
Mexico: Hold my beer
Mountains have 2 things: elevation and slope.
Slope is bad: it makes cultivating crops impossible because water runs. It makes movement hard, so both communication and trade suffer.
But elevation per se is not that bad.
These cities are in flat, high plateaus
The only regret I have is that I couldn't do more. Ppl reached out from Kenya, South Africa, Netherlands, Argentina, Peru, and so many other countries. I wish I could have done more. If you reached out and I didn't help as much as you needed, I'm sorry.
And if you hear more messages like these from NL but for your country, please forward them to me or simply reply here. These really make it all worthwhile to me.
Also, books pack hundreds of hours of thought, while news articles pack maybe 1-2h. So the intensity of thought per minute of your time is much higher in books.
And ppl love news so much that the valuable ones will reach you no matter what. No news to waste your time going to a news portal every day.