Zero to One: How To Build the Future

Book 10 of 52 in the Mitch’s Notes Project

Why This Book and What’s In It For You?

“This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking.”

This book is about founding a different business, not improving an existing one, and definitely not about founding an incrementally better one. The book “offers no formula for success” and instead offers ideas. Good ones.

“Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.”

Some of the principles provided in this book will guide and inspire while others will serve as heuristics through which you can run your own ideas and assess their viability. The ultimate value of this book depends on the viability of your ideas. What are you bringing to the table?

Where Should You Start?

Start at the beginning. It is a quick read.

Category: Entrepreneurship; Strategy

1: The Challenge of the Future

The future is going to be different and developed out of today’s world. Looking for contrarian secrets in today’s world is how you create the future.

Technology is creation, globalization is distribution

When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work — going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things — going from 0 to 1 .

Thiel’s contrarian view (which no longer feels contrarian) was that technology, not globalization is the story of our future. I do, however, think that his definition of a startup is an improvement over the legal definition.

“Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.”

2. Party Like It’s 1999

“When I was running PayPal in late 1999, I was scared out of my wits — not because I didn’t believe in our company, but because it seemed like everyone else in the Valley was ready to believe anything at all.”

My two take-aways from this chapter that absolutely apply to the current economic cycle are:

1. Raise more than you need when the money is there.
2. The principles that create great companies don’t change based on economic cycles

Raise more than you need when the money is there.

We knew we’d need more funding to reach that goal. We also knew that the boom was going to end. Since we didn’t expect investors’ faith in our mission to survive the coming crash, we moved fast to raise funds while we could. On February 16, 2000, the Wall Street Journal ran a story lauding our viral growth and suggesting that PayPal was worth $500 million. When we raised $100 million the next month, our lead investor took the Journal’s back-of-the-envelope valuation as authoritative. (Other investors were in even more of a hurry. A South Korean firm wired us $5 million without first negotiating a deal or signing any documents. When I tried to return the money, they wouldn’t tell me where to send it.) That March 2000 financing round bought us the time we needed to make PayPal a success. Just as we closed the deal, the bubble popped.

The principles that create great companies don’t change based on economic cycles

The dot-com bubble created its own playbook that read something like:

1. Make incremental advances
2. Stay lean and flexible
3. Improve on the competition
4. Focus on product, not sales

These lessons have become dogma in the startup world; those who would ignore them are presumed to invite the justified doom visited upon technology in the great crash of 2000. And yet the opposite principles are probably more correct:

1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality
2. A bad plan is better than no plan
3. Competitive markets destroy profits
4. Sales matters just as much as product

Always doing the contrarian thing is not the right answer in starting a business or investing.

“Instead ask yourself: how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”

3. All Happy Companies Are Different

“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.”

Thiel’s definition of monopoly is important. When we hear the word we think of government mandated monopolies like utilities or 19th century “Robber Barrons” taking control of railroads or oil. His definition is better:

by “monopoly,” we mean the kind of company that’s so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute.

If you are creating something new and valuable it will not be subject to competitive pricing equilibrium.

“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.”

Founding a Monopolistic Company?

1. Start by asking yourself “what valuable company is nobody building.” See Different for more thoughts on this topic.
2. Then ask “how are you going to capture some of the value you create.” See Monetizing Innovation for a detailed framework on this topic.
3. Frame your “market as the union of several large markets.” See Play Bigger for a detailed framework on this topic.
4. Avoid stasis, “equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.” This is similar to the “Life is growth. Business is Growth. You grow or you die.” mantra that Phil Knight lived by while founding Nike (Shoe Dog)

4. The Ideology of Competition

The Ideology of Competition and Higher Education

Like me, Peter Thiel at one point thought he wanted to be an attorney. Unlike me, he had interviews to clerk for the Supreme Court. He was rejected by the Court and instead started PayPal and the rest of his story is history.

With the benefit of hindsight, we both knew that winning that ultimate competition would have changed my life for the worse. Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new. It’s hard to say how much would be different, but the opportunity costs were enormous. All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.

The ideology of competition in our education system is alive and well.

Our educational system both drives and reflects our obsession with competition…And it gets worse as students ascend to higher levels of the tournament. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking [OR LAW!]

For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

I DON’T KNOW! Grad school in general and law school in particular is the the great “keep my options open” ideological trap that leads to unhappy attorneys / professionals /academics drowning in student loans.

How to Handle Competition

1. Avoid it. Competition and rivalry “causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.
2. “If you can’t beat a rival, it may be better to merge. This is what Peter and Elon Musk did during the dot com bubble.
3. “Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win. There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.
4. Follow the advice in the next chapter.

5. Last Mover Advantage

“Escaping will give you a monopoly , but even a monopoly is only a great business if it can endure in the future.”

Monopoly Durability — Your Competitive Moat

We often think of this as the competitive moat. Once you have won, how do you defend what you’ve won while expanding into new territory? You should start with asking yourself this questions: “will this business still be around a decade from now?”

Durability isn’t measured in revenue growth, OKRs, V2MOMs or any other measurement framework. It is measured in market forces and longer-term trends. Success is incumbent on your ability to anticipate and strategically address those forces and trends.

For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short -term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. Those who succumb to measurement mania obsess about weekly active user statistics, monthly revenue targets, and quarterly earnings reports. However, you can hit those numbers and still overlook deeper, harder — to — measure problems that threaten the durability of your business.

Monopoly Characteristics

“Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.”

You may recall this quote was used verbatim in Play Bigger. There are four characteristics:

1. Proprietary Technology — The clearest way to make a 10x improvement is to invent something completely new. Or you can radically improve an existing solution: once you’re 10x better, you escape competition.
2. Network Effects — Network effects make a product more useful as more people use it. Network effects can be powerful, but you’ll never reap them unless your product is valuable to its very first users when the network is necessarily small.
3. Economies of Scale — A monopoly business gets stronger as it gets bigger: the fixed costs of creating a product (engineering, management, office space) can be spread out over ever greater quantities of sales.
4. Branding — A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly.

Another Apple Example

Apple is susceptible to imitation (advertising, branded stores, design, price, etc.). It draws on the four characteristics of monopolies to create durability.

1. Apple has a complex suite of proprietary hardware and software technologies.
2. And it enjoys strong network effects from its content ecosystem: thousands of developers write software for Apple devices because that’s where hundreds of millions of users are, and those users stay on the platform because it’s where the apps are.
3. It manufactures products at a scale large enough to dominate pricing for the materials it buys.
4. Apple’s brand is notoriously world class.

How to Gain the Last Mover Advantage

“You must study the endgame before everything else.”

1. Start Small — “Every startup is small at the start. Every monopoly dominates a large share of its market. Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market.”

“The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.”

2. Scale Up — Amazon had the “first goal of cataloging every book in the world, and now it stands for every kind of thing in the world, period.” Plus, you know, a little thing called AWS.

3. Don’t Disrupt — as you expand into adjacent markets avoid competition as much as possible. “Indeed, if your company can be summed up by its opposition to already existing firms, it can’t be completely new and it’s probably not going to become a monopoly.

What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover — that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits.

6. You Are Not a Lottery Ticket

Phil Knight believed luck was involved in building Nike. Malcolm Gladwell wrote that “success results from a ‘patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages.’” On the other hand, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square believes that “Success is never accidental.”

Thiel uses definite and indefinite

Thiel uses the 2x2 chart at left to work through differing perspectives on the future. The chart immediately strikes me as a bit simplistic, but stereo-typically helpful. So where do you plot yourself?

The x axis divides those that believe you control your future (definite) from those that don’t (indefinate).

Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options.

Hello law school!

A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “ well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it.

Hello imbalanced, eccentric, startlingly focused and driven, Invictus-loving creators!

The y axis is self-explanatory.

So here are the categories:

1. Definite Pessimism — the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it.
2. Indefinite Pessimist — looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it
3. Definite Optimist — the future will be better than the present if he plans and works to make it better.
4. Indefinite Optimist — the future will be better, but he doesn’t know how exactly, so he won’t make any specific plans. He expects to profit from the future but sees no reason to design it concretely.

I’m fairly sure I’ve met Mr. Indefinite Optimist a time or two on campus. In fact, I met him a time or two in the mirror.

Instead of working for years to build a new product, indefinite optimists rearrange already-invented ones. Bankers make money by rearranging the capital structures of already existing companies. Lawyers resolve disputes over old things or help other people structure their affairs. And private equity investors and management consultants don’t start new businesses; they squeeze extra efficiency from old ones with incessant procedural optimizations. It’s no surprise that these fields all attract disproportionate numbers of high-achieving Ivy League optionality chasers; what could be a more appropriate reward for two decades of résumé-building than a seemingly elite, process-oriented career that promises to “keep options open”?

Starting to feel a little too real.

Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. If they don’t go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers.

Ooof <hides resume>

“Indefinite optimism seems inherently unsustainable: how can the future get better if no one plans for it?”

The other three views of the future can work. Definite optimism works when you build the future you envision. Definite pessimism works by building what can be copied without expecting anything new. Indefinite pessimism works because it’s self — fulfilling: if you’re a slacker with low expectations, they’ll probably be met.

Ok, so acknowledging a problem is the first step right? What can be done about it? Thiel suggests that you have to “reject the unjust tyranny of chance.” And accept that “you are not a lottery ticket.” That is not a bad take. Mine is this. If you have a plan, execute that plan, and otherwise maximize the conditions for success, determine your own fate, while still acknowledging some luck. Maybe that is just the indefinite optimist in me still trying to get out.

7. Follow the Money

Power Law of VC Investing

“MONEY MAKES MONEY…we don’t live in a normal world; we live under a power law.”

Thiel shows how the “power law becomes visible when you follow the money.” The Power Law is this: startup outcomes don't follow a normal distribution.

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.

The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.

This is different for a growth stage investor, but the general premise holds true. The “Power Law” goes beyond venture investing and entrepreneurship. Your career should follow a Power Law.

Power Law of Your Career

“When you choose a career, you act on your belief that the kind of work you do will be valuable decades from now.”

Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.”

“That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.”

Power Law of Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs (and investors) should fall in the Definite Optimist category. Once established, you can see through the entrepreneurship power law lens:

1. The most important things are singular: One market will probably be better than all others
2. One distribution strategy usually dominates all others
3. Time and decision-making themselves follow a power law, and some moments matter far more than others
4. What’s most important is rarely obvious. It might even be secret.

8. Secrets

“Contrarian thinking doesn’t make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.”

Why Aren’t People Looking for Secrets

There are four social factors that inhibit the search for secrets:

1. Incrementalism — Baby steps. (Yes the book written by the Dr. Leo Marvin!) Doing a bit better gets outsized rewards in our society. A few points better gets you an “A”.
2. Risk aversion — People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong.
3. Complacency — Every fall, the deans at top law schools and business schools welcome the incoming class with the same implicit message: “You got into this elite institution. Your worries are over. You’re set for life.” But that’s probably the kind of thing that’s true only if you don’t believe it.
4. Flatness — globalization disciple. If it were possible to discover something new, wouldn’t someone from the faceless global talent pool of smarter and more creative people have found it already?

“To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.”

The Case for Secrets

In many respects I think Thiel is preaching to the choir. People that read books on creation and entrepreneurship are also probably going to believe that there are secrets left to be discovered. But just to say we checked the box:

If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth. The actual truth is that there are many more secrets left to find, but they will yield only to relentless searchers. There is more to do in science, medicine, engineering, and in technology of all kinds.

“The same is true of business. Great companies can be built on open but unsuspected secrets about how the world works.”

How to Find Secrets

There are two kinds of secrets: secrets of nature and secrets about people. Natural secrets exist all around us; to find them, one must study some undiscovered aspect of the physical world. Secrets about people are different: they are things that people don’t know about themselves or things they hide because they don’t want others to know.

“The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking.”

9. Foundations

I don’t agree with everything in this chapter, but there is one point on which I unequivocally agree:

“A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed. Beginnings are special. They are qualitatively different from all that comes afterward.”

The foundation period is a slippery concept. Thiel breaks it down to establishing co-founders, the early team, team commitment, ownership, possession, control, board members, salaries, and equity awards.

1. Co-founders — When you start something, the first and most crucial decision you make is whom to start it with. Choosing a co-founder is like getting married, and founder conflict is just as ugly as divorce.
2. Founding Team — It is very hard to go from 0 to 1 without a team. Now when I consider investing in a startup, I study the founding teams. Technical abilities and complementary skill sets matter, but how well the founders know each other and how well they work together matter just as much. Founders should share a prehistory before they start a company together — otherwise they’re just rolling dice.
3. Team Commitment— You’re all in or you’re all out. “If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. You’re either on the bus or off the bus.”
4. Ownership — who legally owns a company’s equity?
5. Possession — who actually runs the company on a day-to -day basis? •
6. Control — who formally governs the company’s affairs?
7. Board Members — “Every single member of your board matters. Even one problem director will cause you pain, and may even jeopardize your company’s future.” I disagree with Thiel that an ideal board consists of 3 members. I believe that a knowledgeable, engaged independent board member adds infinitely more value than it adds in additional headache. I believe a board of 5–7 is ideal.
8. Salaries — Thiel anchors (ed?) a CEO salary to no more than $150k (in 2007 at least). He believes it sets the tone that cash is secondary in monetary awards. “If a CEO doesn’t set an example by taking the lowest salary in the company, he can do the same thing by drawing the highest salary. So long as that figure is still modest, it sets an effective ceiling on cash compensation.”
9. Equity Awards — “Startups don’t need to pay high salaries because they can offer something better: part ownership of the company itself. Equity is the one form of compensation that can effectively orient people toward creating value in the future. However, for equity to create commitment rather than conflict, you must allocate it very carefully.”

“If you get the founding moment right, you can do more than create a valuable company: you can steer its distant future toward the creation of new things instead of the stewardship of inherited success. You might even extend its founding indefinitely.”

10. The Mechanics of Mafia

“‘Company culture’ doesn’t exist apart from the company itself: no company has a culture; every company is a culture. A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.”

Professional Culture vs. Startup Mafia

During my law school days I sat at a folding chair in a hallway at the hottest Utah startup of 2009: Omniture. One of my tasks was to plan the legal groups contribution to the Halloween party. Japanese game show games were a blast because that group knew and loved one another. The culture at the investment bank was, uh, a little less friendly.

The lawyers I worked with ran a valuable business, and they were impressive individuals one by one. But the relationships between them were oddly thin. They spent all day together, but few of them seemed to have much to say to each other outside the office. Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other?

vs.

From the start, I wanted PayPal to be tightly knit instead of transactional. I thought stronger relationships would make us not just happier and better at work but also more successful in our careers even beyond PayPal. So we set out to hire people who would actually enjoy working together. They had to be talented, but even more than that they had to be excited about working specifically with us. That was the start of the PayPal Mafia.

Recruiting

“Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.”

Talented people don’t need to work for you, especially in today’s environment. They have to choose you. Thiel suggests yourself some version of the following questions: “Why would someone join your company as its 20th engineer when she could go work at Google for more money and more prestige?”

The only good answers are specific to your company, so you won’t find them in this book. But there are two general kinds of good answers: answers about your mission and answers about your team.

1. Mission — You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done.
2. Team — You should be able to explain why your company is a unique match for him personally.

Team Building

“On the outside, everyone in your company should be different in the same way — a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.”

“On the inside, every individual should be sharply distinguished by her work…the best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing.”

11. If You Build It, Will They Come?

One of the themes of the upcoming Mitch’s Notes books is sales. It has been eye-opening to see how sales, not product, distinguish early winners and losers among startups. With its sidekick, marketing, sales beats product all day long.

“Even though sales is everywhere, most people underrate its importance.”

“Whatever the career, sales ability distinguishes superstars from also-rans.”

“Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.”

It’s better to think of distribution as something essential to the design of your product. If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business — no matter how good the product.

Complex Sales

Deal sizes range from $ 1 million to $ 100 million. At that price point, buyers want to talk to the CEO, not the VP of Sales. Businesses with complex sales models succeed if they achieve 50% to 100% year-over-year growth over the course of a decade.

Personal Sales

Most sales are not particularly complex: average deal sizes might range between $10,000 and $100,000, and usually the CEO won’t have to do all the selling himself. The challenge here isn’t about how to make any particular sale, but how to establish a process by which a sales team of modest size can move the product to a wide audience.

SMB Sales

For a product priced around $1,000, there might be no good distribution channel to reach the small businesses that might buy it. It’s not that small business proprietors are unusually backward or that good tools don’t exist: distribution is the hidden bottleneck.

Marketing

• Marketing and advertising work for relatively low — priced products that have mass appeal but lack any method of viral distribution.
• Advertising can work for startups, too, but only when your customer acquisition costs and customer lifetime value make every other distribution channel uneconomical.
• A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too. Whoever is first to dominate the most important segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole market .

Remember the Power Law: one of these will be far more effective than every other distribution channel.

“Everybody has a product to sell — no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor.”

12. Man and Machine

I find it interesting that back in 2007, Thiel had a clear take on the ubiquity of strong AI. I found a few quotes that are interesting, but believe this chapter is only of marginal benefit for entrepreneurs.

But that premise [computers will replace us] is wrong: computers are complements for humans, not substitutes.

“The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.”

But the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?

13. Seeing Green

This was one of my favorite chapters. Not just because it provided a great framework for thinking through the viability of startups, but because it used Elon Musk’s Tesla as the poster child for success. Closing stores, inventory balances, kickstarter-esque car announcement, etc. at least create an opportunity to argue that the durability of Tesla may be in doubt. First the framework:

1. The Engineering Question — Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? A great technology company should have proprietary technology an order of magnitude better than its nearest substitute.
2. The Timing Question — Is now the right time to start your particular business? Entering a slow-moving market can be a good strategy, but only if you have a definite and realistic plan to take it over.
3. The Monopoly Question — Are you starting with a big share of a small market? Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.
4. The People Question — Do you have the right team?
5. The Distribution Question — Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? The world is not a laboratory: selling and delivering a product is at least as important as the product itself.
6. The Durability — Question Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? Every entrepreneur should plan to be the last mover in her particular market.
7. The Secret Question — Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?

“Doing something different is what’s truly good for society — and it’s also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.”

“No sector will ever be so important that merely participating in it will be enough to build a great company.”

Telsa 7 for 7, or Something Less?

Thiel went point-by-point through his framework to show that Tesla checked all 7 framework boxes. Under timing he mentioned that “Tesla secured a $465 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy. A half-billion-dollar subsidy was unthinkable in the mid-2000s. It’s unthinkable today. There was only one moment where that was possible, and Tesla played it perfectly.”

Again, it will be interesting to see how this one plays out. Despite getting a perfect score from Thiel, durability is a fickle thing and when one-time strengths, like loans and subsidies, go away, do you have a business that can last another 10 years?

14. The Founder’s Paradox

I am coming to the conclusion that imbalance, eccentricity, a definite optimism worldview, a growth mindset, are not symptoms of success, they are the drivers of success. Extremism begets extremism.

This chapter is about why it’s more powerful but at the same time more dangerous for a company to be led by a distinctive individual instead of an interchangeable manager.

Over-simplistic sure, but an interesting model

The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme; we need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.

Above all, don’t overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company…To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship — or jeering — for the truth. The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.