““Quirky, Airbnb, and Uber are great examples of entrepreneurs taking advantage of the expanding scale of exponential impact. They have created billion-dollar companies in record time. They are the absolute inverse of everything we believed was true about scaling up a capital-intensive businesses. For most of the twentieth century, scaling up such businesses required massive investments and time. Adding workforce, constructing buildings, developing vastly new product suites—no wonder implementation strategies stretched years into decades. It wasn’t unusual for a board of directors to “bet the company” on a new and extremely expensive direction whose outcome would remain unknown until long after most of those board members retired. That was then.””
