Your company is a maximization machine—it wants to make the best use of its finite resources—so it is greatly interested in identifying precisely who to invest in, and how.

The problem with this stems from the way your company executes on these good intentions. Why, for example, does it assume that it will net a good return only from certain people? Surely, the cliché that “Our people are our greatest asset” applies to all of the people in the company. As we’ve seen, every human brain retains its ability to learn and grow throughout adulthood. For sure, each brain grows at a different speed and in a different way, but this implies only that each person learns differently, not that—categorically—some people do and some don’t. Therefore, the best course of action for any maximization machine worth its salt would be to figure out where and how each brain can grow the most, rather than zeroing in on only a select few brains and casting aside the others.

4.2. Are You Ready?

“According to the book Super Founder, by Ali Tamaseb, around 60 percent of the founders of billion-dollar startups started another company before their wild success and many lost a ton of money. Just 42 percent of them had a previous exit of $10 million or more, so the majority “failed” by the standards of venture capital.

But they came out on the other side with a basic mental model of a startup. They understood the operational details and what it might look like if that tiny startup became successful. That’s it. That’s the magical key to success.

So while companies spend millions of dollars on “leadership development,” they invest next to nothing supporting bottom-up entrepreneurship. This has to change. Unleashing the problem-solving, business-building energies of every team member is essential to building a humanocracy.

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.

Successful bidders for objects whose true value is unknown routinely turn out to have paid too much: they won because they were the most optimistic. When there are few publicly held shares in small companies whose success or failure is hard to predict, these shares are more likely to be held by people who overestimate their value than by people who underestimate it. Most such investments fail, but the losses might, though need not, be offset by occasional spectacular gains. The market value of a security is often a poor guide to the value likely to be created in the business over the long run.