Winner Takes Most

Is there a business in creating/investing in only market follower companies? They won't ever be the biggest, but they might take 10% of a market, and the winner has done all the hard work of proving that the market exists and creating a viable product.

&quot;The Chinese have dealt with that issue by protecting their market.&quot;<p>Can anyone explain why this ends up not being a bigger international trade issue? It seems to me like it would be a giant flashpoint, but it seems not to be.

Is this always true?<p>Or can we just not come up with compelling counter-examples, because the brands that won in their category are more compelling than the brands that split a category?

Death from a thousand cuts. The only way a distributed system could take on a monster is by VCs investing in 50 $100 million dollar companies using a distributed communication platform. Because the way it is now most of the investments go to winner take all companies. And in order for the market to use something different at scale it needs to be 10x. so a 50B company would need to become a 5B dollar open market with 5 or 10 winners.

Something&#x27;s going on that&#x27;s more than just network effects. Google was arguably not the first dominant search&#x2F;advertising company, and Facebook was not the first social network, etc. But these companies can convince very good engineers that it&#x27;s more profitable to join them than to compete against them, whereas their predecessors failed to do that. How they do this merits more investigation.

&quot;Lately, we’ve been wondering if there is an end to this pattern on the Internet and mobile. We think it is possible that an open data platform, in which users ultimately control their data and the networks they choose to participate in, could be the thing that undoes this pattern of winner takes most.&quot; Urbit?