One thing that starts looking fake after enough years in tech is the obsession with “disruption” as the explanation for every successful company. The winning company simply executed better than everyone else in a market that already existed.
Facebook was not some impossible conceptual breakthrough. Social networking already existed. MySpace existed. Friendster existed and the majority of features Facebook had were present in these 2. People already understood the product category immediately. Facebook just executed the product, identity model, infrastructure, and growth mechanics better at the right time. It gave a sense of exclusivity, the website was easy and simple. It did not innovate, but identified the pain points and ran through the competition.
Same with Instagram. Photo sharing was not new. Filters were not new. Posting images online was definitely not new. Instagram just removed friction and executed the mobile behavior better than everybody else circling the same space.
Google was not the first search engine. Not even Altavista. Remember Yahoo? They were the Google of early 2000s. YouTube was not the first video platform either. Funny enough, Youtube didn't even start as a video platform, but rather as a dating site (there goes your long term vision and business plan). Palantir didn't “invent” enterprise data analysis. A lot of what they did was closer to “what if IBM actually shipped systems people could operationally use.” Tesla is not the first car company, nor electric car. Not even the first one to aim for self driving cars (that'd be General Motors in 1939). There goes your vision and long term planning. GM out of all...
That’s not an insult, by the way
Execution is the whole game more often than corporate leadership want to admit. But execution is less romantic than invention, so the industry keeps rewriting operational success into mythology after the fact. You don't make movies about the day to day. You want a vision, a story to tell. A innovator that saw how the future is to be and made it so. Also, if the vision and long term planning is not that important, then all of a sudden the actual operators (engineers, managers, directors...) are appreciated more.
Because “we had better organizational discipline, better timing, better infrastructure scaling, better product judgment, and fewer self-inflicted constraints” does not sound like news worthy. It sounds like management consulting. The funny thing is that engineers usually understand this earlier than investors or media people do.
If you’ve worked inside large organizations long enough, you realize how much of the market is sitting there underserved not because nobody had the idea, but because incumbents are bloated, fragmented, internally political, or too distracted to execute coherently. A shocking amount of startup opportunity is just: “the current providers are slow and annoying.” That’s it. Not revolutionary science. Not paradigm shifts. Just execution gaps large enough to drive a truck through. Google came up with the transformer idea and yet they still nearly missed the boat on AI anyway
The mythology persists because Silicon Valley culturally prefers founder-as-prophet stories over founder-as-operator stories. The second one sounds less... romantic, even though it’s closer to reality in most successful companies. Even Peter Thiel wrote a self-congratulatory book (Zero to One) talking about disruption, when his achievement at the time is just another payment processor as if Visa, Mastercard and others didn't exist already. I think this distorts how people understand markets. They start hunting for untouched greenfield ideas instead of looking at existing systems that everybody already complains about daily. They think success requires inventing demand when in practice a lot of billion-dollar companies come from noticing that existing demand is being served badly.
You don’t necessarily win by creating something nobody has seen before. A lot of the time you win because the existing players became complacent, over-complicated, slow, or organizationally incapable of improving the thing they already own.