Great Fortunes Based on Borrowed Concepts

1.      Federal Express. Fred Smith, the founder, first proposed the concept of a centralized distribution system, where all shipments passed through a hub first, in a paper while at Yale. But the business model was already in place, as the Federal Reserve System used it to process and distribute paper checks. This was the model that inspired Smith’s concept.

He got a bad grade on the paper, as the professor disliked the idea, but Smith founded the company anyway and succeeded in a triumph of execution based on determination and patience.

2.      Google.  Both founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, came from academic families, growing up in the refined world of higher education. This world revolves around academic publishing, where careers depend on articles written for a small audience. Peer approval, which is vital, is expressed by the popularity of a theory as shown by citations in other articles. Frequently cited articles are boosted by the approval process.

      Similarly, the founders featured the PageRank algorithm, which prioritized the importance of web pages based on the number and quality of links pointed to them, just like citations pointing to a given article.

     The earlier search engines ranked results by keywords match or paid promotion. PageRank was clearly better, and the rest, as they say, is history.