There Are No Secrets, Only the Obvious

Peter Thiel is the man who founded PayPal and was the first outside investor to put money into Facebook.

In the beginning of his book Zero to One, he mentions a question he always asks when hiring people:

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

I think it’s a good question. However, I feel that the reason it’s difficult to answer isn’t because we lack such truths. This question faces the side of those who “know.” And for those who know, there is no place of their own.

Insights Cannot Be Monopolized

In 1922, William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas of Columbia University published a paper listing instances where different people arrived at the same conclusion simultaneously. There were 148 cases. Calculus was one, the telephone another, and natural selection as well. Darwin had kept his ideas tucked away for fourteen years, but during that time, a manuscript with the same content arrived from a man he had never met.

Their conclusion was that if the conditions are right, discovery is inevitable. The problem is clear, there are people who want to solve it, and the tools to solve it exist in the world. Once these three things align, multiple people will reach the destination. There may be differences in speed, but it cannot be monopolized.

Therefore, the strategy of finding a truth that no one has noticed and staking a claim there is unlikely to work. Even if you manage to sit there, someone else will soon arrive beside you.

So, what is actually open?

No One Bets on the Obvious

In 1978, James Dyson was frustrated with his vacuum cleaner while renovating his home. The bag would clog, and the suction would fade during use. He believed in a single line: it is better if suction does not drop.

After 5,127 prototypes, he created something that worked, but no appliance manufacturer would make it. His explanation was that a company making money from replacement bags would never release a vacuum that didn’t need them. It was fourteen years after that initial frustration before he could release it under his own name.

Nvidia followed a similar pattern. In 2006, they released a system called CUDA, which allowed semiconductors designed for drawing images to be used for other types of computation. They also believed in a single line: performing the same calculation in parallel is faster than doing it sequentially in a single line. Therefore, computation would eventually shift in that direction.

At the time, the world wasn’t built that way. Computing speed was determined by how fast a single line could be run, and Intel, which made those lines, was the center of the industry. To seriously claim that parallel processing would become the mainstream was to be viewed as insane. Moreover, this wasn’t even Nvidia’s core business. They sold components for gaming; CUDA wasn’t even a side hustle. Even so, they poured one-third of their R&D budget into it. Gross profits dropped, shareholders complained, and some people left. For six years after that, nothing happened.

There was no one who didn’t know it’s better if suction doesn’t drop. There is no way AMD, which made the same kind of semiconductors, didn’t know that parallel processing was faster. Both were single lines that anyone knew. It’s just that no one bet on them.

The Obvious is Left Over

Why is it open? I think it’s because no one argues against it.

If there is no opposition, there is no debate. If there is no debate, no one finds a reason to bet. The suction of vacuum cleaners and parallel computing weren’t rejected in meetings; they likely never even made it onto the agenda.

That is why the obvious remains left over. And if you stay there for a long time, it looks like madness from the outside. To insist that parallel processing would become the mainstream during Intel’s heyday could only be described as crazy. But the person inside is simply believing in the obvious. They aren’t exercising “willpower,” nor are they “enduring.” That is why they can hold out for fourteen years or six years.

When you hold out to the end, the axis shifts. Even though the iPhone and Android are both smartphones, the iPhone becomes an “iPhone.” No matter where you buy a bag, it holds things, yet Louis Vuitton becomes something wonderful. I believe monopoly isn’t about market share, but rather that the axis used to measure value is fundamentally different.

There is no such thing as a secret that only I know. But there is the obvious—the obvious that only I believe in.