As tech insinuates itself into every aspect of our lives, companies and protocols act as pseudo-nation states with enormous impact and broad scopeTerra, a crypto project, takes inspiration from the founding of Singapore and how prime minister Lee Kuan Yew fostered prosperity.

Think Like a Nation-State

Define yourself by what you're not.<ul><li>Telegram has defined itself as a user-friendly private alternative to Big Blue's surveillance state.</li><li>As Facebook has fumbled through data breaches and congressional hearings, Telegram's allure has only grown more pronounced.</li></ul>

Find Your Counter-Positioning

Focus on how you can intensify your most pronounced advantage.For example, Tiger Global focuses on its greatest strengths by moving quickly and relying on an encyclopedic knowledge of successful business models to pick winners, even at the cost of outsourcing commoditized operations.

Intensify Your Advantage

Every successful company cares about serving its customers to some extent, but very few are genuinely obsessed with pleasing them in that word's truest meaning.To please your customers, you must obsess over them.A good example of true customer obsession is Coupang, who take extraordinary measures to improve their service, including giving delivery people a manual outlining the most esoteric details.

Obsess Over Your Customer

Built optionality into the product by designing the platform to host the long-tail of assets.<ul><li>Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah founded OpenSea when NFTs were scarcely a blip on the world's radar.</li><li>They preserved optionality by keeping burn low and bringing in money through fees.</li><li>When "PFP" collectibles like Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks took off in 2021, OpenSea was well-positioned to capitalize.</li></ul>

Provide Optionality In Products

Sometimes aligning incentives involves tinkering, like spinning out part of the team to capitalize on an idea directly.The goal is the same: maximum incentive alignment.Example: AngelList constantly tinkers to align incentives for its many experiments.

Align the Incentives

Move to a space that captures instant eyeballs, especially if you have missed the early train.There is a difference between having a well-known brand and an influential one. FTX has made one of the most ambitious attempts to secure the latter.Entering the American market late, the cryptocurrency exchange has sought to capture attention and influence by partnering with beloved sporting institutions, buying the naming rights to the Miami Heat's arena, and sponsoring MLB uniforms.

Invest in Soft-Power

High impact work requires concentration, often for hours at a time. Levels Health gives its team the maximum possible deep work time by actively discouraging tools like Slack and meetings.This creates a business that runs asynchronously, reducing interruptions and protecting unbroken deep work.

Maximize Deep Work Time

Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.

Great businesses never sit still. They are constantly in a state of reinvention and internal bottoms-up disruption. Doing so opens new opportunities and protects against competitive displacement.To stave off staleness and disruption, businesses must innovate from within.

Proactively Reinvent Yourself

<ul><li>Attracting exceptional people is a startup's most important task outside of finding product-market fit.</li><li>The most effective way to hire extraordinary people is to be so persistent it hurts.</li><li>Persistence and pestering are twins with scarcely a mark to distinguish them.</li><li>Find the right words, the right message, you can persist - if you fail, you pester.</li></ul>

Be Persistent

Nice pointers for businesses to go from also rans to success.

After publishing over half a million words on some of the world’s most innovative businesses, these are the 10 lessons I come back to again and again. You’ll find tactics from Stripe, FTX, Tiger Global, OpenSea, and other exceptional organizations.