Groundbreaking companies often ignore the existing market pyramid. Instead of competing on price or features, they create new markets by serving customers previously excluded because their price point was considered impossible. As Jim McKelvey advises, if you want to be big, you must first "go low."
The stereotype of the bold, risk-seeking entrepreneur is often a myth. Jim McKelvey's research reveals many of history's most impactful innovators were not adventurers by choice. They were ordinary people excluded from the herd who were forced to find a new path, making them entrepreneurs by necessity.
Scaling a product or system doesn't just make it bigger; it fundamentally transforms the nature of the problems it creates. Jamer Hunt shows how Facebook evolved from a simple social tool into a political weapon as it grew. This demonstrates that solutions for one scale are often irrelevant for the next.
Jamer Hunt proposes "scalar framing" to tackle wicked problems by analyzing them at different magnitudes. For example, urban cycling can be a product design problem, an urban planning problem, or a policy problem. Shifting scales reveals new intervention points, creative solutions, and unexpected collaborators.
Jim McKelvey argues the term 'entrepreneur' is misapplied to those starting businesses in established fields. He reserves the term for innovators tackling 'perfect problems'—unsolved challenges that have no existing playbook. These true entrepreneurs operate under a completely different set of rules than typical businesspeople.
We interact with a digital world that isn't true to physical scale—a document at "100%" on a screen isn't its real size. This separation of information from our bodily senses, as Jamer Hunt describes, makes it difficult to comprehend the real-world implications and magnitude of our digital systems and actions.