Why Is It So Hard to Beat the Establishment?
When Frank Williams passed away in November 2021 the tributes talked about a man with no money who started a world-beating Formula One team.
This dream of starting from nothing and making it big is getting less and less realistic as industries become more established and the incumbents become more entrenched.
Lord Alan Sugar became a household name by hustling from childhood to creating a £100m+ business and a £1bn+ empire, but this is less a story of social mobility and more a case of right place right time.
The tech rush of the early 2000s was a great leveller, the establishment couldn’t move fast enough.
It was enabled by a computing revolution before it which gave Lord Sugar his big break.
In 2000, the most valuable company in the world (by market capitalisation) was General Electric at $466.08bn. Microsoft and Intel were on the top ten list, at $306.81bn and $220.68bn each. Google was two-years-old at this point, and Mark Zuckerberg was 16 and still four years off launching Facebook.
By 2021 Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon had bypassed the $1tn valuation, with Facebook having dropped just below that mark. Their combined value stands at nearly $10tn. Since the start of 2019 they’ve all doubled in value, Microsoft have done 3x and Apple have passed 4x.
This changing of the guard is hard to see happening again for a while, we’ve truly lived through a generational shift since the turn of the millennium.
Crypto, blockchain, and associated products such as NFTs have had an impact but are still a bit of a Wild West. The long-term sustainability and impact across industries remains to be seen.
AI is being heralded as the next great opportunity but it won’t be a leveller, it’s already owned by the establishment. The cost of entry is insurmountable unless you are relying on platforms and tools created by the incumbents such as AWS.
Web3 has a lot of tech folks babbling excitedly but it’s still too nebulous and a lot of the unaddressed issues that crypto is facing would be 10x in that environment.
In the book Britannia Unchained they talk about the power of a young nation, this is the same principle. The energy that goes into building something new, and exploring new terrain.
In the excellent Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed, he concludes his chapter on marginal gains using an analogy about mountain peaks. You can keep improving until someone finds a different mountain, like Blockbuster who built an excellent business for two decades until the ground completely shifted.
New apps and tech companies now are iterative improves on that which has come before. Social media platforms were enabled by us all having access to the internet to communicate. Ride- hailing/ridesharing platforms like Uber and Lyft were enabled by us all having a GPS device with us at all times. On-demand TV like Netflix and Hulu were enabled by us all having internet- connected TVs and set-top boxes, coupled with high-speed access.
Uber didn’t rely on having any cars themselves, nor did Netflix have to worry about creating their own set-top boxes.
The next opportunity is green, but it won’t be as disruptive as digital tech and the internet. There’s every chance that ESG (I’ll write about this as a future part of 50 things) will level the playing field but it won’t be as disruptive as fast as computing, digital technology, and the internet.
New frontiers create the window to break through, early movers who see the potential reap the rewards, and the established order adapt or disappear.
It is impossible to imagine today starting a Formula One team from an empty carpet warehouse and taking business calls from a telephone box, but perhaps the new frontier is already presenting itself to us in the form of eSports and the Drone Racing League.
These new markets weren’t interesting to the incumbents initially, but one thing we learnt by building our company in Wales is you can get a hell of a lot done while hiding under the radar.
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Where do you think there are opportunities to beat the establishment in the next decade? What’s the next seismic shift, and how can we be ahead of it?
As always, drop me a tweet — it’s been great to hear about your lived experiences that match the lessons and pains I’ve felt!
I hope there’s some value in putting these down. I’d love to hear your perspectives on the topics, Twitter is the best place to find me: @GarethTSq
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