[60s]015 The one strategy shared by all great founders

I've recently read a post on Substack. The post is an interview with Chris Miller. Chris Millar is my favorite contemporary historian. He is an associate professor at Tufts University and the author of _Chip War_, a stunningly good chronicle of the microchip industry.

He reflects on how great founders think differently from economists. Economists think of everything trying to maximize a utility function, and that function is usually in dollars and cents. Great founders also have investors who would like them to consider return on equity, but that's not how they make decisions.

Think of Jensen Huang ten years ago, even though Wall Street warned him against it, he still poured Nvidia's money into building CUDA and the ecosystem around it. It's because Jensen saw potential in using GPUs for general purpose computing tasks and democratizing computing resources.

Another example is Amazon. Jeff Bezos has been relentlessly focusing on customers and their needs, and that drives decisions to repeatedly invest in infrastructure, technology, and new business lines. It may sacrifice short-term returns but it builds customer loyalty and market leadership in the long run.

If your mode of thinking is purely economic, which is focused on return on equity or maximizing shareholder value, you will miss a lot of what actually drives competitive, successful people.