As I read about Justice Department’s antitrust suit against Apple, I asked myself, “how is it that Apple, like so many other large companies, is so good at suppressing competition? They don’t teach you how to do that in business school. When companies become big and dominant, they become worse at many things but become very good at anticompetitive tactics.”(1)

I think I have a good answer to this question. Or at least a plausible one. But to get to the answer, let me start with Y Combinator.

Paul Graham at YC has a good essay about his experience advising entrepreneurs. He says they usually ignore his advice, and after years, he figured out why.

He says the reason is that entrepreneurship is counterintuitive. That it’s like skiing — where you need an instructor to do things that don’t come naturally — like lean forward to stop, vs. walking — most people don’t need a walking coach. He says that this is why entrepreneurs don’t listen to advice — because it goes against their intuition.

In his words:

“Startups are very counterintuitive. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s just because knowledge about them hasn’t permeated our culture yet. But whatever the reason, starting a startup is a task where you can’t always trust your instincts.”

On the balance, I tend to agree with him. Knowing how to disrupt a large, dominant, incumbent is not intuitive. To do it, you have to do a lot of things that goes against the grain, many of which Graham has written about.

On the other hand, you know what is very intuitive? Knowing how to snuff out the competition when you are a large, dominant, incumbent. It seems to come naturally — railroads, Microsoft, IBM, and now Apple. They execute the same playbook. Bundling. Buying potential competitors when they’re small. Leveraging market share to push around vendors and resellers. “You can buy this product you absolutely must have only if you buy our other products.” “If you carry our competitor’s product you still have to pay us as if you bought our product.” (2)

In business schools, there is no course on “how to throw your weight around when you’re the dominant player and eliminate competition.” On the other hand, there are zillion courses on entrepreneurship. There is no Medium publication called “Monopolist’s Handbook,” but there is “Entrepreneurship Handbook.” But everyone seems to know how to do the first, but not the second.

As a biologist, it makes sense to me. If you had a population that was wired to maintain the power hierarchy, you probably would have an evolutionary competitive advantage vs. a population that was the opposite. I mean, if everyone was good at disrupting the status quo and no one was good at maintaining it, you would end up with a very unstable society. It tells me the societies evolved so that people who have power instinctively know how to maintain power. And that the number of people who are good at keeping the little guys down will tend to be higher than the number who are the opposite.

Of course, this can and has led to a lot of injustices, oppression, and abuses, and I’m not condoning it. When you have a stable society that also values or has a tradition of justice and rule of law, it’s a good combination, but when you don’t have the right set of values and tradition then it’s a disaster. So a repressive but cohesive society is not going to be competitive from an evolutionary standpoint.

My guess is that we have evolved so that every society has a small number of revolutionaries who serve as a pressure relief valve, who see things differently, who ask uncomfortable questions, so that when things get really bad they serve to catalyze a reset of the hierarchy. But you probably don’t have too many of these people, because you’d end up with chaos.

Interestingly, we live at a time when having that gene, or hard wiring, or mindset — or being taught that mindset — is very valuable in business because there is a business revolution almost every generation now.

In fact, to be a good entrepreneur, you have to have that mindset.

A VC friend of mine once told me, “I studied neuroscience and women’s studies in college. To be frank, women’s studies has been much more valuable than neuroscience in my career as a VC.” (3)

What she meant is that women’s studies taught her to look beyond the accepted social rules and thinking, and to question the conventional wisdom.

In every society, there are accepted truths and taboos. Some exist to benefit society, like “you can’t go around murdering people.” Other exist to benefit one segment of the society over another, like “only adult men can eat meat,” (seen in some tribes) or “woman’s place is in the home.”

Similarly, in business there are conventional wisdoms, like “no one will buy a smartphone without a physical keyboard.”

So what does this mean? It means that

1. You should always try to find a mentor if you’re doing a startup, because it will be very difficult to intuit your way through. Almost all successful entrepreneurs had a mentors (e.g. Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker)
2. Think differently. Ask whether conventional wisdom still holds. Specifically, ask which party the conventional wisdom and the current business structure (supply chain, distribution of profits, pricing conventions, etc.) benefits and how.
3. Think like an incumbent. Think about how you would respond if you were the incumbent and had market power. Anticipate what the incumbent would do and do the unexpected.

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(1) Of course, it may be that they became dominant because they’re anticompetitive but I don’t think so. Apple, Microsoft, IBM, all became big initially because they had good products, and more importantly they didn’t have the heft to be anticompetitive until after they became big.

(2) On Medium, there are 446,000 posts tagged “entrepreneurship” and 18 posts tagged “monopolistic competition.”

(3) I have now updated my standard answer to the question I often get asked, “what should I study in college if I want to be an entrepreneur?” I used to say, “history, especially history of business,” but now my answer is “history, and some sort of minority studies.”