May 1, 2019
Even Successful CEOs Get It Wrong All the Time
Jobs, Kalanick, Mayer, Watson. The best founders miss too. The lesson isn't humility — it's that the next great idea is unlikely to come from between the ears of the founder.
Steve Jobs didn't see the power of the App Store until a year after the idea was introduced. He originally wanted all of the software on iPhone to be designed by Apple.
Travis Kalanick only wanted to focus on premium black cars at Uber. He only moved to the UberX model (now the most popular) once a competitor, Lyft, forced his hand.
Marissa Mayer decided to keep layoffs secret at Yahoo! to avoid bad publicity. She didn't think it would create paranoia among most employees, which it did.
Thomas Watson, the chairman of IBM, famously said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." He didn't think computers would become a universally-adopted technology.
Sam Altman didn't see GPT-4's coding capability until weeks before launch. Adam Mosseri spent two years arguing internally that Instagram's algorithmic feed was a mistake — then shipped it anyway. The list keeps writing itself.
The vast majority of businesses fail. If they don't fail, founders and CEOs still get it wrong all the time.
No one, including the founder or CEO, can see everything. Often the greatest ideas come from within or outside the company, but not from between the ears of the founder.
The one you don't see yet is the one that will define your next decade.