In our new world, there’s no second place. “The Great Opportunity” of our age is in the creation and ownership of these winner-take-all platforms…
Joshua Cooper Ramo, (author of The Seventh Sense), Fortune,
Why ‘Network Power’ Is the Secret of Success for Apple, Facebook and Amazon

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When I presented my synopsis of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, I asked everyone to write a phrase on their handout:

It’s not zero to one of many; it’s zero to one!

In the article by Mr. Ramo, quoted above, he offers a little more insight into the incredible dominance attained by a very few companies. It is that the more a company attains the position of the “one,” then the better the “one” gets at learning what we all want and need. From the article:

The more Amazon sells, the more it learns about what we want, and the more we want to use it. You know the joke: “We all work for Google now.” Search by search, we’re making that company more valuable.

And, “search by search,” Google gets better at what we want from search; and, really, from a lot more than just search.

And any company that is not-Google or not-Amazon is left further behind.

So, this new world is such a challenge to those who live in the old world. They have trouble even understanding it, and they really have trouble competing with it.

Over the last 18+ years, I have read and presented a synopsis of one new business every month. And I have been something of a student of the books that attempt to chronicle, and explain, and warn about this new world that is not only coming, but is in many ways already here. I have presented synopses of The Second Machine Age, and Zero to One, and The Third Wave, among others. And next week, I will present my synopsis of The Seventh Sense by Mr. Ramo. So, here’s a really jarring final except from his article:

It’s become popular recently to label this age as a Fourth Industrial Revolution or a Second Machine Age—but you can see this is a bit silly, like calling your smartphone the Fifth Telegraph Revolution or your car the Sixth Horse Revolution. Frankly, we’re at the start of a whole new era. It’s an age of network power. If the great opportunity for British firms 100 years ago was exploitation, if it was massive production for the companies of Sloane’s era, in our age the great chance ahead is all about connection.

It really is hard to keep up; in understanding, and in practice.

But we have no choice, do we?

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You can purchase my synopses of Zero to One, The Second Machine Age, The Third Wave, and many more, with my comprehensive handouts and the audio recordings of my presentations, at our companion site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.  My synopsis for The Seventh Sense will be available soon.