In next weeks Business901 podcast, I discuss Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future with Blake Master. Blake was a student at Stanford Law School in 2012 when his detailed notes on Peter Thiel’s class “Computer Science 183: Startup.” The notes became an internet sensation. Before writing Zero to One with Peter, Blake co-founded Judicata, a legal research technology startup, and worked at Box and Founders Fund. 
An excerpt from the podcast:
Joe: You talk about owning that space. I think of the analogy of a T-shape person is that you have to have a long vertical line in place and own that space before you start spreading horizontally. Is that a good accurate description or could you define that for me a little bit?
Blake: Yeah, exactly. We say every business, to be successful wants to get to this monopoly estate where you really own this really valuable space. You want to own your entire market or as much of it as possible. Well, a startup, especially, starts small. It follows then that the best way to become a monopoly as a small business entrepreneur or as a startup is to start with a very small market. When you start with an extremely small market, you want to dominate it. I think some of the most, fascinating businesses in the last 15 years have started with markets so small that they probably didn’t even appear to be good business opportunities at the beginning.
Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook at Harvard, where the goal was to sign up, the 10,000 students of Harvard at first, not like everybody in the world. You think about a target market of 10,000 people, for free internet product and, in 2004, an MBA Tech might even say that, it doesn’t look like a business opportunity at all.” And yet, what Zuckerberg was able to do with them, not only get, 60% of the target market signed up in a week. All of a sudden that looks like a very auspicious start and then he can sort of, scale out of Ivy League. This becomes an Ivy League phenomenon, kind of scale out in concentric circles to hit colleges, but you don’t let anybody without a .edu e-mail address sign up. Gradually, start from this core that you dominate, and you build out in concentric circles. That’s a really a powerful model. So, if you start thinking about expanding too quickly, precisely that lack of focus, that can hold you back.
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