At one well-meaning Southern California fitness app startup I visited regularly, the young founders held weekly meetings at which the chief technology officer would educate his engineers on different aspects of the development process. But as time went on, he grew less likely to lecture on programming biofeedback interfaces than on business strategy. It was as if he had cracked a new sort of code. He spoke of scalable solutions, long-term contracts, and high switching costs—steps they could take to ensure “defensible outcomes” and achieve a “platform monopoly.

He had fully accepted the startup playbook’s emphasis on massive growth above all else and was now turning his tremendous capacity for programming toward that singular, highly limited ambition. The product was less important now than the prize. He and his partner were not in a position to entertain a true disruption of the marketplace, anyway. They had won one of those pitch-your-idea contests by coming up with an idea literally overnight. The venture capital flowed in days later, and these kids were—like so many other young entrepreneurs who accept tens of millions of dollars up front—obligated to build a company worth a billion dollars.