But back in 2013, when I first met Chip, Airbnb was still just getting started. Though we had nearly four million guests staying in homes around the world, most people saw us as strictly a technology company. But Joe, Nate, and I knew we had more to offer. We knew that we weren’t just in the business of home sharing. We envisioned a community that helped people with not only where you stay, but what you do—and whom you do it with —while you’re there. In other words, a complete end-to-end trip. What we were actually selling was hospitality.

In recent years, large corporate business has focused its marketing and promotion efforts on collecting “vanity metrics”—like social media followers, subscribers, or clicks. But those metrics don’t always correlate with sales, profit, or reputation. That is, they don’t measure engagement or trust—they simply show how many people took some form of marketing bait. By considering “collecting” over “connecting” (with customers), these companies are becoming too caught up in collecting page likers and followers and have forgotten to build relationships with those individual customers who are already listening, following, or buying. Having 100 passionate fans of your business who are eager to buy anything you release is exponentially more effective than having 100,000 followers who simply follow your business to win something like a free iPad.

Launching isn’t a onetime, singular event, but a continual process of launch, measure, adjust, repeat. The cofounder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, has said that if you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. It’s ridiculous to believe that every company grows out of a founder’s fully formed and unchanging idea, especially since most wildly successful companies achieved their place only by course-correcting, changing entirely, or iterating their way to greatness.

But for all creative jobs we would pay one incredible employee at the top of her personal market, instead of using that same money to hire a dozen or more adequate performers. This would result in a lean workforce. We’d be relying on one tremendous person to do the work of many. But we’d pay tremendously.

This is the way we have hired the majority of employees at Netflix ever since. The approach has been remarkably successful. We have exponentially increased our speed of innovation and our output.

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.