The fundamental problem with Silicon Valley’s favorite growth strategy
qz.com"blitzscaling isn’t really a recipe for success but rather survivorship bias masquerading as a strategy."
That says it all. Really, that's how YC works - fail fast and cheap, profit from the survivors. Great for VCs, not so much for the cannon fodder.
"We have reserves."
That's better than a tech landscape with no access to venture capital at all, and startups taking 10x longer to reach critical mass, if they even do.
There's a reason why the US tech industry is orders of magnitude larger than the rest of the world, access to capital. Go try to grow a startup in Europe with its risk averse investors, and see how far you get.
You'll start to see this effect even more in the biotech space, where up front access to capital is crucial in developing and testing products/medicines that must go through expensive FDA approval.
I'm not convinced that access to capital is the sole, or even primary, reason the US tech industry is much stronger than elsewhere. There are many factors like entrepreneurial culture, low corruption, and established/concentrated support infrastructure that seem a lot more important.
It's one of the two or three biggest reasons, and definitely not the sole reason. The modern system of industrial-scale venture capital available in the US - going back widely four plus decades - is rivaled only by China in the last decade. More broadly that culture of risk capital spans every tier, from the smallest angels to the biggest VC firms. The comprehensive nature of it is exceedingly rare among nations. It's also now a very old phenomenon in the US, going back to the earliest days of the industrial revolution (everyone from Tesla to Edison to Ford were financed by what was essentially venture capital).
Most of developed Europe, except for a few nations, scores well on having low corruption, comparable to or better than the US. Western Europe also widely has a strong social safety net that should be encouraging to entrepreneurs from a life-risk perspective (which may actually result in the exact opposite outcome: a culture of lower risk taking; the culture that will install the world's most elaborate social safety systems, is more likely to be one that aggressively dislikes risk-taking). While only a few small nations in Europe are as wealthy as the US, several more are close enough that the difference shouldn't matter. The problem is that capital is overwhelmingly unwilling to participate in venture investing.
The US not-so-secret sauce is: easy access to risk capital + a culture that has historically strongly encouraged entrepreneurial activity + a massive single market with one core language (that is also conveniently the global language of business, media and culture) + reasonable taxation and regulation policies + strong protection of property rights + ease of market access (low tariffs, low trade barriers, a foreigner can easily start/own a US business from almost anywhere) + very welcoming to foreign capital (few capital controls) + an enormous lead coming out of WW2 (which helped the US be the first to the tech epoch, which has buffered its lead ever since) + the global reserve currency + a massive traditional financial system (great for IPOs, stocks, acquisitions, leverage, etc. - it's why Alibaba is on the NYSE) + 19 of the top 20 universities on earth, and four or five dozen more that are world-class + a very successful university meets business development system (which has helped incubate countless new leading companies and technologies) + inexpensive energy + half a century of built-up knowledge, experience, specialization in every tech segment + a long history of immigration policies that allow people to come to the US and pursue their dreams (Japan and China, the #2 and #3 economies, have overwhelmingly shunned foreigners becoming citizens by comparison; the US tech industry wouldn't be anything remotely close to what it is today without the Andy Groves, Nadellas, Elon Musks, Jensen Huangs or Collisons).
That's the short list. It can't be replicated.
Nice list, I agree with it, but I don't think it can be the full story.
Why? None of the above are specific to software, if the above was the full story, why would the US not also dominate the world in e.g. Autos, Chemistry, Electronics, Batteries etc? There must be other factors. Maybe first-mover advantage, maybe software benefits more from centralisation, from economies of scale than other industries? Other suggestions?
What "tech"? Most of what passes as "tech" now is a business model.
Up until about 2000, when you went to a Silicon Valley VC, you had to have a patent and a working prototype. Using that model, the VC industry as a whole was very profitable from the 1970s to the end of the century. In the 2000s, the VC industry became a net lose. Buying market share until everybody else goes broke is not a net win for investors.
Surely VCs would be amenable to reforming their practices and demands upon companies, and be content with less drastic growth targets, to create an environment that is more sustainable and less race to the bottom? No one's calling for them to be abolished, until they've at least tried to fix the conditions they've created.
Even worse for the users. In this analogy, if startups are cannon fodder, users/customers are the blood that gets spilled.
Startups really should have this written on a tin: "We're are experiments to our investors. Our product is an experiment to us. We do not care about you, or helping you, and we will not change the world; our regular marketing copy is just straight-faced lie. The entire stack, from us up to investors' investors, are all running experiments on how to make money fastest."
Now, I'm (somewhat) fine with this. Let experimenters do experimenting. I just hate that the whole ecosystem is consistently lying to regular people.
The startup workers as well, I guess. They take tremendous risks.
Though it would be a stretch to say they don't care nor help the users. Of course they need to keep the users hooked/get new users onboard to "grow" and get the investments. And focusing on marketing is not very reasonable since you can say the same about basically every marketing material.
Still, I guess the point is that the customers of such startups must always be prepared of the possibility of the company suddenly shutting down one day and the product ceasing to exist. That's true.
It's not masquerading as a strategy, it is a strategy. There's no "bias" - the fact that the same strategy was employed by a lot of companies that didn't survive doesn't make it a bad strategy, since the whole point of the strategy is to optimize for a small probability of massive success.
That's the whole VC industry model, not just YC. And it's a more economically healthy model than half of Wall St.'s money makers. Limited downside, comparatively unlimited upside, relatively low systemic risk (eg no TBTF).
Why pick on YC? All angel/VC investment works this way.
> That says it all.
Does it? Competition and survivorship have long been accepted as the premise of capitalism. What I find more disturbing is that we've been told competition will be to the benefit of the consumer, and this focus on network effects means that companies are looking for a way to stay on top WITHOUT the virtue of providing the best benefit.
This leads to Comcast-like situations, with customers that hate their provider but want the product and have no real options. Or Facebook, where people can join get disgusted and join an alternative...that can't provide the desired service because the desired service requires that everyone else be there.
Comcast's dominance is propped up by regulatory capture, not free market capitalism.
So substitute Amazon, Facebook, or any of the companies that people have many complaints with, yet continue to funnel their business to because competitors can't match the network effects.
The last I checked, using Google search is free. What do you think would happen if they started charging for it?
I'm not sure how citing a single example counters my point, but I'll bite: Searchers aren't the customers of Google, and we have no shortage of stories on HN about Google abusing or potentially abusing their monopoly.
To return to my point: healthy market competition involves providing value for the consumer. In a healthy market there are low profit margins because high profit margins indicate a change for competition to enter and undercut. Companies competing and failing or falling to competition are not (necessarily) a sign of problem, as an above poster seemed to be saying.
However, companies seeking to find ways to prevent competition or deny it via network effects ARE a sign of an unhealthy market. And companies (as cited by the article and most of the tech-buzz-startup scene) are all about trying to grab that advantage and hold it. Logically the consumer is the one that ultimately suffers, per the very premise of healthy market competition.
I can see the day coming when the "sign in" button on "google.com" is a popup, instead of a little box in the upper right. Maybe you can still bypass it, but a dark pattern suggests strongly that you must log in to search.
The difference is debatable.
Not really. Using the government to make your competition illegal is not free market.
There is no free market mechanism that can prevent the sale of the market.
That's the government's job. The government fails at it now and then, which is why the citizens need to vigilant and careful in whom they elect.
Do you believe that if the government ran the economy (socialism) there would be no corruption?
I don't believe in strawmen.
I’ve read and listened to quite a bit of stuff from Reid Hoffman (Masters of Scale, LinkedIn’s pitch deck etc) and have never found him or any of his advice particularly convincing.
Maybe I’m speculating wildly here but it feels like the main thing that made LinkedIn successful was that it was a first mover in the business social network space that used every dark pattern and email notification they could conceive of at a time when users were less cautious about their privacy. Now they have their moat and defend it with every trick they have. Their social auth API provides watermarked profile pics and they drop attributes without any notice.
If that’s the way you want to do it, I guess that’s your choice. But the professional social networking space could seriously use a breath of fresh air.
If everything was "just timing and luck", then we would be using friendster, myspace, ICQ, AOL Chat, and bebo today, instead of facebook/twitter/instagram/snapchat/linkedin
There is something more than that, and good execution is crucial, and it is good to know on what worked well, and what didn't work out for both the current winners and past losers.
I think Reid has good things to say about what worked for them back than, and take it like that.
There is no rulebook on startups, as all of them have different patterns, but reading on what worked 2003-2010 (pre-mobile times), is not going to hurt anyone.
Dismissing the success as just being merely 'dark patterns' + timing, seems a bit short sighted.
you proved that not everything is just timing and luck but you didn’t prove that nothing is. The difference between it and myspace is something so much better than it came out that is surpassed the network effect. while there isn’t really anything compelling to replace linkedin in its base feature set that it started with.
As someone who's lived and worked in the Bay Area for 16+ years, this is a fantastic article. It's just spot on in its characterization of the old and new Microsoft, the old and new Google, Lyft/Uber, and many other companies.
I worry that many won't read it because it's so long.
Now I need to go look up everything else Tim O'Reilly has written. He is a wise man. I of course know who he is -- mainly through books and conferences I suppose -- but I didn't know about his other experience in business.
It's interesting that in the early days of the web he started a Yahoo-like company before Yahoo and sold it to AOL, and a Windows web server company that competed with Netscape.
On Monopoly: It has been a though I have for some time. I wonder how could they not form monopolies. Who has 4-5 taxi apps on their phone? Who has 2-3 social profiles? Who has the habits of jumping from a searching engine to another? A minority. Their product are almost natural monopolies.
They are very difficult to fight against monopolies because when they have user commitment, the need for the product is filled entirely by one company. In addition, it is very difficult to make the user change, it's part of a habbit.
I might be wrong there. Just a though I had, but interesting to discuss. Is it really possible to avoid monopoly with these products?
There are a number of options, and not all of them are splitting the company into a bunch of fully co-equal units, which is a process that works better when things cover an area.
In telecom, it was typical, due to regulation, that you'd have different parts of the business that couldn't interact at all. I wasn't permitted to talk to people with certain badges because of their business unit. You could easily do this with the advertising business for each of these large companies, or split it off entirely, and force that ad exchange to work with their competitors, for instance. You could regulate the news feed so that the pipe was a lot dumber and configurable, so that the company would no longer be allowed to experiment on human psyches.
There are tons of options that don't result in breaking facebook into 12 facebooks. Pulling the advertising out, and regulating advertising in general, is the best solution I've been able to spitball though.
Interesting points
Who has 4-5 taxi apps on their phone? Who has 2-3 social profiles? Who has the habits of jumping from a searching engine to another?
Uber, Lyft, and some smaller competitors already exist yet people don't need all the apps; they just choose one and it works fine. Likewise with search engines: some people use Google, some use Bing, some use DDG. It's suboptimal but monopolies are suboptimal in different ways.
The problem with network effects was solved in the 1980s breakup of AT&T where the telcos all federated with each other. Federated protocols like SMTP and XMPP existed before Facebook and Twitter; rather than a historical accident they made a decision to pursue lock-in.
Yes, that was my point: they choose one and it works fine. It is easier in that case to ensure and keep a certain mass of users and so, for a long time. That leads to the possibility of blitzscaling and monopoly I think.
To me, the problem comes when you provide a service. The service market seems much more difficult to diversify than the product market. When the need is well filled by one company, it is difficult to keep competition alive. It is obviously not binary. It depends on the service.
For instance, for the product side; Nike, Adidas, etc. are constantly trying to improve and change their products to keep up with the complex shoe market even if they are pretty colossal companies. Because the user need for a new shoe pair is coming on a really short scale and the competition is fierce.
I'm not seeing the same kind of competition with services. When you use a service that fills the need, you don't change in general. Or at least, people change on a very long scale. Some times, it even takes a cultural shift to change habits.
On the google vs bing example: Well, ok some uses bing, but in majority because microsoft makes it easy to do so on their systems ;-). There exists some very good alternatives, like duckduckgo, but it represents a minority.
On monopoly: I don't really understand the surprise the article seems to show on this topic.
> Most monopolies or duopolies develop over time, and have been considered dangerous to competitive markets; now they are sought after from the start and are the holy grail for investors.
It's not now that they're sought, it's always been that way. Because that's literally the way a business wins this game. That's the holy grail, literally the driver behind competitiveness - the desire to monopolize a market, so that you can comfortably do whatever you want, and earn whatever money you need. That's the very carrot society uses to create entrepreneurs - the name of the game, from society's POV, is to get people working towards monopoly, creating value at low prices in the process, and once the winner is about to emerge, to pull the rug out from under them. The game is a lie, winners can not be allowed. That's the market way to prosperity.
The only thing that's changed is that some people are now not afraid to publicly say they're seeking monopoly. But they've always been seeking that.
--
RE your comment, I sort-of agree. I strongly agree with the observation that I explicitly do not want to have 4-5 taxi apps on my phone, and my life would be much happier if I could just use one. Similarly, I'd prefer to have just one app for public transit, just one app for maps/navigation, and preferably integrate all three categories into single super-app, whose sole purpose is to help me get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. But that's more of an UX issue.
And it wouldn't have to be one app. Just one per user. In a perfect world, all those services - mapping, taxis, public transport - would be available through open APIs, and you could use free or commercial super-apps interchangeably. Services would be serving you, proxied by your super-app, instead of serving you on a plate to their investors. Alas, most companies seem hell-bent on capturing all the value they produce - they have this kind of greed that ruins things. I know that market pressure sort-of forces this to happen, but I wish there was a way to correct this.
Most people shop at more than one shop, fly multiple airlines and buy more than one brand of clothing.
That's only because/if one shop/airline/brand doesn't cover all of their needs cheaply enough.
It's not like most people choose multiple providers because they care about health of the competition. From customer's point of view, competition is noise.
Uber is actually not the best example of a natural global monopoly - because it needs to compete locally - most taxi rides are for local population. So there might be a natural monopoly (or duopoly) for a taxi app - but one per a metro area. This is different from AirBnB - where the app works truly globally. https://thinkgrowth.org/uber-is-going-to-0-and-benchmark-kno...
Interesting thoughts, really.
But maybe change contexts—would you call Coca Cola a monopoly? Certainly Pepsi gives them a good run for their money, even if they aren't as large technically speaking (I have no idea).
I mean, people will always have their preferences. I'm not sure if that makes for a monopoly on its own.
How much that preference is formed by the company's inherent pursuit of a monopoly, well...
I'm not sure if it's that different from other contexts, or if it is.
FWIW - PepsiCo is far bigger than CocaCola
Thanks. I started to assume it was Coke, then realized it's probably in the holdings.
Anyway I think it still makes sense, yeah?
Uber is not a very good example because you can easily switch to another taxi app if there are better benefits/the costs are lower etc. Even the VP of Engineering of Uber acknowledged it in a talk a few years ago. Something that accumulates over time and has a social networking effect would be much harder to replace.
Uber and Lyft are both owned by Softbank's investment fund now, so there is a monopoly at a higher level.
They no longer compete in some countries like Malaysia, where one of them has just withdrawn from the market.
How many airline apps do you have installed? How many video streaming apps?
> what is happening today is that the market has almost entirely turned into a betting machine. Not only that, it’s a machine for betting on a horse race in which it’s possible to cash your winning ticket long before the race has actually finished. In the past, entrepreneurs got rich when their companies succeeded and were able to sell shares to the public markets. Increasingly, though, investors are allowing insiders to sell their stock much earlier than that. And even when companies do reach the point of a public offering, these days, many of them still have no profits. According to University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter, 76% of all IPOs in 2017 were for companies with no profits. By October 2018, the percentage was 83%, exceeding even the 81% seen right before the dotcom bust in 2000.
I thought the end of the article had some of the most interesting content. Amazing how many companies IPO without being profitable!
This is an absolutely incredible article. Possibly the best I've seen on HN in 6mo to a year.
Normally I wouldn't post a comment just to say that but the amount of true insight ORiley provides is impressive.
Understating of the web, of SV of business, of growth of IPOs and well reasoned analysis and predictions of what's coming next in funding.
It is long and absolutely worth the read.
I know a few people who became very wealthy by starting companies or businesses but entrepreneurship is not the only path to success.
IMO, the world is better off with a good mix of long shot bets to build large scale businesses and also many people being very happy to run solo or small businesses providing services or selling products on a small scale.
I am sometimes critical of Google, FB, Microsoft, and Amazon - sometimes they deserve criticism - but except for FB all of these companies also enrich my life and I am happy they are in business.
I am also happy personally to have been a consultant, very well paid wage slave for large companies, and have a small business as an author and sometimes selling niche AI software products. I never got very rich, but I have usually just worked 25 to 32 hours a week, with several times in my life taking many years of mostly leisure time.
There are many ways to be successful in life - choose wisely!
What kind of niche ai products do you work with? Curious to know if your ok to share
A natural language processing toolkit that I wrote in Common Lisp about 15 years ago and converted to Ruby about 10 years ago. A simplified version in Haskell is in my Haskell book and a simpler version is also in my Common Lisp book - all the book code is on github https://github.com/mark-watson?tab=repositories
The fundamental problem with capitalism (not just in silicon valley) is that access to capital is what defines winners and losers. Of course I'm being simplistic and there will always be underdog stories, but the reason any company becomes as big as it is, is capital, plain and simple.
The immediate effect of gaining massive capital is tremendous. Outcompeting for both workers as well as getting to market sooner is an obvious benefit. The ability to lobby in government against potential roadblocks of whatever it is that you're doing is another. Just from the word itself, capitalism is rigged for those with capital.
Further down the line though, you are now beholden to this immediate level of investment, and as this article shows, this is where problems arise.
> The fundamental problem with capitalism (not just in silicon valley) is that access to capital is what defines winners and losers.
Well yeah, it's fundamental because that's the definition! So it's not a problem. Capitalism works as designed.
Working as designed is not the same as working as intended or working well.
So there's no problem with Silicon Valley, just with "capitalism" itself? Yes, access to capital is good business. But I think they are saying that the stock market is what determines winners and losers in a properly functioning piece of the capitalist economy. IPO is supposed to get you started in the game. These blitzkrieg idiots want to declare victory before they even enter the race. Then convincing their minions that's it's "capitalism's" fault. What a joke!
>Would incumbent transportation companies have had more time to catch up, leading to a more competitive market?
i'm not sure that in general incumbents catching up leads to increased competition, i think it leads instead to the incumbents protecting their position and using it to stop the innovation and the resulting threat of disruption.
In case of Uber it wasn't about incumbents per.se., it was about regulators. The blitzkrieg allowed to crush regulators and thus increase competition by adding "ridesharing" into the mix.
Similar thing of using your huge weight to crush a chokehold on the industry happened when Jobs took control over phone apps away from the telecom companies.
The craziness of recent Uber and WeWork and other unicorn valuations (with SoftBank just doubling their bets to show valuation growth) looks like a peak in the investment euphoria and what we should expect next is a swing back ala https://www.oaktreecapital.com/docs/default-source/memos/200...
This article adds to that notion.
I read the headline and thought "Step 1 collect users, step 3 profit," and yep, that's it.
> their enormous valuations are based on the premise that if a company grows big enough and fast enough, profits will eventually follow.
There's a broader historical perspective that's missing in this article.
The Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914) was much like today. You had extremely rapid growth of new industries fueled by widespread availability of capital; a pervasive bubble economy punctuated by massive stock market panics & depressions; rapid development of new technologies; widespread fraud & corruption; a feeling that the common man was missing out on these developments (hence the term "The Gilded Age", a reference to it being shiny on the surface but dull & black inside); a widespread populist movement; political discontent; and globalization. And these technologies proceeded in overlapping waves: ironclads were replaced by steel ships; steel made steam engines possible; steam paddleboats replaced sailing clipper ships; propellers replaced paddles; steam turbines replaced triple-expansion engines; oil replaced coal in boilers. It was not uncommon for a ship to become obsolete before she entered service in the early 1900s.
The effect of the mass availability of capital during this time period (other than in destabilizing society) was to dramatically increase the rate of adoption of these new technologies. Without the massive capital influx into railroads, it's doubtful that there'd be enough of a market to drive widespread adoption of the Bessemer process, which made steel cheap enough to use in ships & skyscrapers. Without the mass capital investment in shipping, it's doubtful that there'd be an impetus to develop & perfect the steam turbine or switch from coal to oil as a fuel. Without demand first from the kerosene lighting industry and then from the shipping industry, it's doubtful that there would be gasoline (then a waste byproduct of petroleum refining) to fuel the automobile industry.
Similarly, O'Reilly's looking at Uber and Lyft at this snapshot in time and lamenting that their market power is preventing new ridesharing companies from entering. But the point is not to perfect ridesharing; it's to replace it. Uber and Lyft are arguably already obsolete, with Waymo in active testing in Arizona and California, and will be replaced shortly by self-driving cars. It's doubtful that self-driving cars are the endgame either; I suspect that we'll see intermodal transportation pods that move people & cargo through and between cities automatically.
The point of massive capital investment is to get us to the future faster. It'll be wrenching and cause massive societal dislocation - the first industrial revolution gave us wars of nationalism for the US/Italy/Germany, and the second gave us 2 world wars, the fall of centuries-old dynasties, Communist revolutions, and eventually the Holocaust. But we don't really have a choice.
I agree with you on the effect of massive capital investment : bringing us the future faster ; at the cost of social turmoils. However the necessity of going through those turmoils is false : why don't we really have a choice ?
Because somebody else is will get there first and then inflict those turmoils first, on their terms.
This looks different at different scales. On an individual level, it's being passed over for promotion because the blowhard in the next cube has this great idea for how to apply deep learning, or losing out on a job to the college kid who's up-to-date in Solidity and React while you still work in VB.NET and SQL Server. On a company level, it's going bankrupt because some new startup offers critical new features at 1/10th the price. On a societal level, it's being conquered by other societies that have adopted the new technologies at the cost of the social turmoil and then choose to inflict it upon you. Each attempt to stop the turmoil by fiat just escalates it up a level: if you declare you're never laying people off, your company goes bankrupt, while if you declare that nobody is allowed to innovate your society collapses. (Either from within, where your people look at the technologies other societies enjoy and say "We want that", or from outside, where an invading army lands on your shores and kills you all.)
Americans are particularly blind to this dynamic on the societal level because we're usually the ones inflicting it upon others. "Manifest destiny" was all about inflicting progress upon the Native Americans who didn't want it, while the Cold War & fight against Communism was about a richer, more powerful empire inflicting the way of life that made us richer & more powerful at the expense of social stability on stagnant, poorer, but in-theory more egalitarian and stable societies.
Some of that is happening in the US right now. Dense (mostly coastal) cities; built on clustering effects, immigration, and highly skilled workers; are thriving. That model is working, but it brings with it high pay disparities and disruption of outdated social structures and values. Whereas the older model of geographically disbursed industrialism, which peaked in the 60's or 70's, is faltering.
How does that manifest politically? Look no further than Trump:
https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-t...
His entire candidacy was about "owning the libs" and their globalist, diverse, cosmopolitan world. A backlash against socioeconomic change, with very real consequences.
Yup. The "two economies; two moneys" divide between urban coastal America & the Rust Belt / Deep South is probably one of the greatest silent threats to American security. Historically nation-states do not survive divides in regional inequality that are this big or this entrenched; the temptation grows for the rich region to secede and engage more with the global economy, while the resentment from the poor region builds and can lead to outright violence. And America's biggest defensive weapon, historically, has been two oceans: this doesn't apply when the potential enemies share a continent.
And the modern side will also be the losing side if violence breaks out. The urban prosperity machine requires trade and highly specialized work, which is vulnerable to political turmoil. Whereas the guns and food are overwhelmingly in the rural parts of the country.
I don't think it's all doom and gloom though. There are some promising signs that cities don't have to be coastal to embrace the new model and prosper. Austin, Pittsburgh, Denver; to name a few.
And even though the Trump administration is doing damage, it could also act as an inoculation. Their complete lack of competence is a limiting reagent. And in response, a lot of people who took benign, stable political institutions for granted (their relative rarity could easily be missed from a typical education) no longer do.
Happening in other developed countries as well. Mega-cities and urban coastal corridors are globalizing faster than the nation-states to which they are legally subsumed under. Cities are beginning to test the boundaries of their prescribed sovereignty in trade and other matters.
London and Brexit immediately come to mind!
That's a good point, but shouldn't we have learned from history?
I don't think "we don't really have a choice" is true. Societies DO learn from their mistakes, albeit slowly. "Culture" exists for a reason -- it's how groups of people change their behavior.
For example, I think the memory of World War II absolutely did make decision makers behave differently. Nobody wants total war again -- they know how bad it is. We learned from our mistakes. (This doesn't stop stronger countries from picking on weak ones, but that's not total war.)
As an aside, I do think there is a form of "group selection" that happens in nature. Societies that are unable to collectively change their behavior -- learning big lessons on long time scales -- don't survive. "Sapiens" is largely about these "mass delusions" and I think he's onto something (although many would argue its unscientific, and many have argued against group selection as a mechanism of evolution).
In the past we had mass delusion to start religious wars, but that same mechanism can perhaps be used to put value on measured growth rather than winner-take-all outcomes.