Zero to One: Difference between revisions

▲ | text = 🚀 Because globalization and technology are different modes of progress, history shows stretches of both together (roughly 1815–1914), of technology without much globalization (1914–1971), and—since 1971—of intensive globalization alongside relatively narrow technological advance centered on IT. Everyday language about “developed” and “developing” countries implies a technological finish line that others must simply reach, but that framing hides the need for invention. The more useful answer to the future’s central question is that technology matters more than globalization: if China merely doubles energy output with today’s tools, it doubles pollution, and if hundreds of millions of Indian households adopt U.S.-style living with current technology, the environmental damage is catastrophic. For most of human history, societies were static and zero-sum; then, from the steam engine in the 1760s until about 1970, sustained technological progress made the modern world far richer. Expectations in the late 1960s—four-day workweeks, energy too cheap to meter, holidays on the moon—did not arrive; outside computing and communications, our surroundings look surprisingly familiar. The task now is to imagine and build new technologies that make the twenty-first century more peaceful and prosperous than the twentieth. Such breakthroughs usually come from startups—small, mission-driven groups that can do what lone geniuses and large bureaucracies cannot—whether in politics, science, or business. A practical definition follows: a startup is a group you can persuade to pursue a concrete plan to build a different future. In this view, progress is a choice: definite people crafting specific plans that create new value, not an impersonal convergence of global averages. Building those plans inside tight-knit teams is how new technology compounds over decades. ''Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.''