Why Was the 2007 iPhone Still a Breakthrough?

Ben Horowitz says the 2007 iPhone was still a breakthrough because a new product only has to be unbelievable at one thing. Reviews called it a bad phone, a way worse computer than a normal computer, and a keyboard much worse than a BlackBerry. It put a camera and a GPS in a pocket, and you cannot build Uber on a PC even now. It did not have to be better than the last thing at everything.

The same test shows when a technology looks either unstoppable or disqualified by today's flaws. Everybody thought 3D printers were the future and would print anything, but 3D printers do not follow Moore's law. More compute power did not make them better, because progress depended on complicated material science, which does not follow that trajectory. 3D printers were not going to change that fast or that much. With AI, hallucinations looked disqualifying and were not that tough a problem to deal with, and sometimes the hallucinations are good.

Founders get the same reading. Something is horribly wrong with every entrepreneur, including him. The firm is not looking for a lack of weakness. The question is whether they are world-class at a thing, the best in the world at something, and whether they have a secret nobody else has. What matters is the magnitude of the strength.