Americans have this sense of cycles in the business, they know that a company on the way of becoming dominant, will inevitably will get a lot of layers in management, and start slowing down on innovation.

What the Americans understood is when this happens, it's the opportunity for a newer, faster, better company to take over the market.

That companies have a lifetime, and when it's overdue it's being taken by someone else. That today's giants won't be tomorrow's giants.

Maybe it's not true for every company, or more that the lifetime vary. Some are very short, some are longer.

But one thing for sure is that in the past 30 years, with the tech accelerating the path of innovation, there's no company immune to that.

Google recently innovated on transformers, but got too slow. They invented it in 2017, and just 5 years later, OpenAI is rising taking their place because they haven't been able to capitalize on it.

And Google itself became a giant by taking over Yahoo, that themselves stopped innovating on algorithms, and started thinking themselves as a portal to put ads on.

When the dream die

I think this vulnerable state in which great companies become big companies always start as a sort of rationalization of the great ideas.

Somewhere between the greed of making more money, and the appealing smartness of knowing what the company is about.

"We're a portal for the web", "We're a search engine", "We're an AI company"

The danger with that is that it seems very smart when you say it. It pleases everybody to know where the company is going.

It gives a false sense of security:

"Oh okay I see what a search engine is"

And for leaders, it seems like this is the thing to do, teams always go chaze butterflies and it feels like your role is to recenter the subject of the discussion.

But here is the catch, all those sentence rely on how things have been so far.

Nobody knows what a portal is anymore, but I guess when Yahoo told Google founder something along the lines of:

"You guys don't get it, we're a portal company... okay? We don't want people to get their results right away, we want them to see ads!"

It means:

"We won. Our solution is good enough, our users will happily use our product forever."

And just like that, innovation stopped at Yahoo.

Turns out, their solution wasn't good enough, and their user switched to Google once released.

The late stage of this process, is of course considering your existence as a company solely as a mean to make money.

Greed and ubris to it's maximum, you increase margins, you think your customers wouldn't be able to operate without you, that your way of solving the problem is the best.

Suddenly, everybody at the company directly or indirectly, isn't working on making a great product anymore, but is here to extract the maximum value out of the customers.

IPO death kiss

And again, this seems like the smart thing to do. Winners are expected to IPO.

But once you do, you're not thinking about the user anymore, you just thinking about short terms gains to maximize shareholder revenue.

You can achieve it by earning more customers, that true, but if you want to increase margins you need to do more with less.

The best way to do that is to cut cost on innovation, and be more aggressive on the sales.

That's a way to become a late stage greedy company.

Where the opportunity lies

What the american startup scene understood, is how slow a late stage greed company is.

Paul Graham famously said that big competitors won't notice you until it's too late.

I think it's mostly because big company won't even consider your in the same market as them.

If they are late stage greed, they will think they are in the "money market" or a leader in a solution that is already obsolete.

That's what the Americans understood, because the next big thing won't look like the previous one at all, that's where the opportunity lies.

ChatGPT wasn't a better search engine.
And the next thing won't be an AI agent.

Tesla Valuation

Probably that Tesla valuation was a bit overstated. But to me, this valuation tell one crazy thing.

People genuinely believe that Tesla, one day will produce more car than the entire american car industry.

And they believe it so much, that it's already priced in.

There's never been that much hope putted in a competitor to an established industry in Europe. Ever.

Google's death

I don't think OpenAI will kill Google, but you can clearly see that they had to change a lot of things to catchup to OpenAI.

After years of rationalization as a monopoly business, they started to cut of on innovation, launch then kill product early when they were not meeting expectations, and that things will keep going like this forever.

But then right in the middle of this, OpenAI comes with a product that in could completely kill the product they exist for.

Probably that if OpenAI appeared 10 years later than they did, it would have killed Google.

Given the current valuation of OpenAI on private markets, a lot of people in the US genuinely believe that a company that didn't had any product 5 years ago, could kill 3 trillion dollar company.

They also genuinely believe that Tesla could kill the entire american car industry, and maybe worldwide?

This is what the US understood that Europe won't ever.

About Europe

See, Europe love big groups. We see big companies as efficient, reliable and able to provide social needs to their workers.

And this goes strongly against the idea of a small company that could replace one of those big groups. "Think about the jobs?" or something like that.

This is something you can see in all the European startup scene. Most companies are not direct competitors of those groups, they are complementary, focusing on smaller markets.

Their ultimate goal is to get bought by those groups. Most of the available capital come from those groups.

There could never be a Tesla rising in Europe. Nobody in their right mind, would have believed that a new company could build better cars than German and French groups.

Here we are 10 years later, and Europe is actively protecting those groups, victims of their abusive position, being now threatened of death by Chinese startups.

Why Japan fell behind

Japan went through an economical boom due to being a very strong innovator in the electronic market, followed by huge innovations in the semi conductors, led by the US.

In 1988, Japan was producing up to 50% of the total semi conductors used in the world and 30-50% of the total electronical products.

Two years later, the real estate bubble pops, and a huge economical crisis followed. Cash reduced, companies shifted towards safer bets, it wasn't about building better products anymore, it was about "making money and surviving".

This costed Japan it's ticket for first place.

Less than 10 years later, Japan produced less than 10% of the global electronic.

And it 2010, semiconductors in Japan were responsible for less than 10% of the global output.

They got outcompeted. They first refocused on making money, and then got lost.

Leaving the opportunity open for the Americans, not contraint from the need of immediate profit. They built better products, more innovative, with Apple introducing the touch screen, a better browser, an app ecosystem, and so on.

Rationalizing in crisis time, is what costed Japan its ticket for the first position.

Japan is famous for being a conversative culture. It's interesting to think that Japan might have shifted towards a recession faster than any other country, "playing it safe" being socially accepted as the right decision more often than not.

China as a leader?

Like Japan before them they now are the main contender to the U.S. domination. And like Japan, China is also a quiet conservative and bureaucratic society.

And this convervatism is also very present in a lot of companies such as Alibaba, where the executive is very thick and very socially defined.

Alibaba once one of the top growing company pushing innovation, just fired the Qwen team leader, youngest P10 leader and responsible for the huge success of Qwen models in business use cases:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/03/alibabas-qwen-tech-lead-steps-down-after-major-ai-push/

Qwen just released their latest model as hosted option only, very different from what it was until then. The departure how the leader hints at a big refocus and restructuring, again rationalization is what kills great idea.

Deepseek don't want any external investment, and do everything on their own, likely due to a fear of culture contamination that might kill the company capatibilies to innovate.

The question is even if China take over the US, how long will it take China to be rational?

Conclusion?

Overall, it seems like human groups go through the same process. Kinda like entropy can only increase, greed can only increase.

Ultimately this greed become unsustainable, when everybody goes from building great products, to just selling more product no matter what.

Those are the planted seeds of the new cycle, new contenders disrupt what was previously thought to be eternal, and become the new big companies themselves.

The Americans understood the second part better than others, by financing aggresively those contenders, they always been able to get first to the innovation possibilites offered by their time.

And that's great cause apparently, nobody survives the slowdown of innovation.