I’ve seen way too many people come out of the corporate world, decide to start a company, and be completely unprepared for what it takes. If they’ve never been on a small team starting from scratch, they’re often a fish out of water. They spend too much money too fast. Hire too many people. Don’t put in the time, don’t have the startup mentality, can’t make hard decisions, are buried by consensus thinking. They end up making mediocre products or

nothing at all.

Don’t let that be your story. If you want to start a company, if you want to start anything, to create something new, then you need to be ready to push for greatness. And greatness doesn’t come from nothing. You have to prepare. You have to know where you’re headed and remember where you came from. You have to make hard decisions and be the mission-driven “asshole.” [See also: Chapter 2.3: Assholes: Mission-driven “assholes.”]

So do the work. Know what you’re getting into. Trust your gut.

And when the time comes, you’ll be ready.

I was also told that a brand-new CEO shouldn’t be trying to make huge acquisitions. I was “crazy,” as one of our investment bankers put it, because the numbers would never work out and this was an impossible “sale” to the street.

The banker had a point. It’s true that on paper the deal didn’t make obvious sense. But I felt certain that this level of ingenuity was worth more than any of us understood or could calculate at the time. It’s perhaps not the most responsible advice in a book like this to say that leaders should just go out there and trust their gut, because it might be interpreted as endorsing impulsivity over thoughtfulness, gambling rather than careful study. As with everything, the key is awareness, taking it all in and weighing every factor—your own motivations, what the people you trust are saying, what careful study and analysis tell you, and then what analysis can’t tell you. You carefully consider all of these factors, understanding that no two circumstances are alike, and then, if you’re in charge, it still ultimately comes down to instinct. Is this right or isn’t it? Nothing is a sure thing, but you need at the very least to be willing to take big risks. You can’t have big wins without them.

Christensen’s insight was that it was easier to go up the escalator of profitability than down. Going down meant voluntarily shrinking profit margins by deliberately making inferior goods, which tended to upset investors and made executives feel like they were jogging in place. This led Christensen to his most enduring and most counterintuitive recommendation: “There are times when it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in lower-performing products that result in lower margins, and right to pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.” It was a point that the buzzword discussion of “disruption” in the popular press

usually missed.

Disruptive technologies, Christensen had observed, often grew out of hobbyist communities. They were developed using “bootlegged resources” in which “off-the-shelf components” were redeployed for something other than their intended purpose. They started out wonky but rapidly improved along attributes of performance that established players ignored.

But even once you had absorbed this lesson, it wasn’t easy to implement. Pursuing niche markets cost profits, making investors question your sanity. This, too, Christensen had foretold: “One of the reasons managers at established firms find it difficult to serve emerging markets is that their investors and customers tell them not to.”

That was the real secret of The Innovator’s Dilemma, which readers often missed. It was not a book about how to succeed; it was a book about how not to fail. Christensen’s book wasn’t a how-to for start-ups but a counterinsurgency manual for senior managers at stagnating firms. Thirteen years in, Huang felt that Nvidia was at risk of becoming such a firm, and it was as much paranoia as optimism that led him to pursue the mad-science market.

Real businesspeople operate in ‘large worlds’, in which problems are ill defined and there are no objectively correct answers. Moreover, the ‘right’ answer will often not be apparent, even in retrospect. Effective decision-makers in large worlds are not maximising; they do not have and never can have the information needed to make the relevant calculations. They confront radical uncertainty. Often they not only do not know what will happen but do not even know the kinds of things that might happen. Although we must abandon ‘the pretence of knowledge’, individuals, institutions and businesspeople need to act in the face of uncertainties.