What Secret Should a Startup Be Built on?

David Senra, reading Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, says a startup should be built on a secret: something important and unknown, hard to do but doable. Every famous idea was once unknown. A conventional truth can matter and still give no edge, because it is not a secret. Ask what valuable company nobody is building. Every correct answer is a secret. If many secrets remain, many world-changing companies are still unstarted.

People skip secrets because they are scared of being wrong. A secret has not been vetted by the mainstream. If the goal is never to make a mistake, do not look for secrets. Senra quotes the founder of Ikea: making mistakes is the privilege of the active, and the only way to make none is to do nothing. The secrets that remain yield only to relentless searchers. Great companies can be built on open but unsuspected secrets about how the world works.

Senra adds an earned secret from a tweet. Mark Leonard, founder of Constellation Software, was in venture capital and kept seeing vertical-market software companies that were a terrible fit for that model. The secret was to buy them, never sell, and compound them. Thiel's close, as Senra reads it, is that every great business is built around a secret hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world. Share it only with fellow conspirators, and take the hidden paths.