Indeed, among the reigning kingpins of Silicon Valley there’s a sort of contempt for things that fail to become massive. Smallness seems like weakness. You may recall the story of Jason Ho, the hacker who created a thriving small business by making time-clock code used by companies around the world. It made so much money that he was able to spend much of his twenties with the freedom to travel and invest. If I’d done that, I’d certainly consider it a success myself.

But when I mentioned Ho’s company to the thirtysomething founder of a very large tech firm, he scoffed. To him, it was “lifestyle business”—Silicon Valley–speak for an idea that will never scale into the stratosphere.

That sort of product is fine, sure, he told me, but Google could do the same thing and put him out of business in a second. If you weren’t aiming to be giant, he asked with a shrug, why bother doing it? This sentiment is arguably even more pronounced in other software markets like China, which has a famously competitive, winner-take-all tech market. When in 2015 I toured the offices of the e-commerce firm Meituan in Beijing, the company was only five years old but in a frenzy of expansion, hiring young engineers as rapidly as they could roll off the transom of computer science programs. The CEO Wang Xing and I peered out over the sprawling floor of coders, festooned with hundreds of plants to make the scene feel less sterile. “In China, you either have to become massive or you will get crushed,” Wang told me soberly. (Meituan alone had survived probably a few thousand competitors, as the tech investor Kai-Fu Lee estimated, when I spoke to him.) In the world of high-tech firms, the race to scale is propelled by a carrot (the magical ease of duplicating and running code worldwide) and a stick (the sharklike competition).