Live versus Dead Players

The demise of Pan Am was a remarkable story, but not a unique one. Nearly every company led by a master P-type innovator like Trippe gets shocked. Some sudden change, whether from a regulatory agency or a new competitor, stops the music. The loonshot-franchise cycle stops working. The wheel turns one too many times, and suddenly there’s a fleet of

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If you are hyper-fixated on an ideal user, you will begin to think of your product as a single player game. You’ll develop tools that enable 1:1 interactions between that ideal user and your product.

But once you start thinking of your ICP as a node in a network – with a white hot center that enables you to spread to acquire new nodes of a network –... See more

Deaths from P-type loonshots tend to be quick and dramatic. A flashy new technology appears (streaming video), it quickly displaces what came before (rentals), champions emerge (Netflix, Amazon), and the old guard crumbles (Blockbuster). Deaths from S-type loonshots tend to be more gradual and less obvious. It took three decades for Walmart to domi

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