It would have been cool to read stories about a few more examples of slingshots, as the author calls them.
replies(2):
Hm. Examples:
- Amazon? Long road to profitability, but there was fast early growth.
- Space-X, which took a long time to get to a successful launch.
- Someone already mentioned Nvidia.
- Waymo, which took about 15 years from start to real service, and now is doubling in size more than once a year.
- ASML, founded in 1984 and took a long time to become the dominant player in photolithograpy.
- Roblox, tiny for over a decade, then gradually found the right market and really grew.
Who else.
I particularly like Waymo because of aggressively most of the media/talking heads wrote them off as "never going to beat Tesla" because google.
In the end, they took a fundamentally different approach at all levels of the product and won.