We worship the first mover.
We tell the stories of the visionary who saw the future before anyone else. I used to believe that was the only path to greatness. If you weren't first, you were last.
It is a dangerous and expensive myth.
Especially now, in the age of AI, I have learned a different truth: The first mover often pays a price so high they can't survive to reap the rewards. Being a fast, intelligent second is often the better way to build a dominant company.
Here is what the second mover understands that the first often doesn't:
The first mover pays to educate the market.
The first company to launch a truly new AI product has to do the brutal, costly work of teaching customers a new behavior. They have to convince a skeptical world why this new category even needs to exist. This is an exhausting and expensive education. You, on the other hand, get to enter a market that is already primed and understands the basic value. Their marketing budget becomes your free research.
The first mover reveals all the mistakes.
The first mover will inevitably make huge, public errors. They will choose the wrong technical architecture, build a beautiful feature that no one wants, or stumble into a regulatory problem they never saw coming. Their public missteps become your private playbook. You learn where all the dead ends are without spending a single dollar or engineering hour finding them yourself.
The first mover builds the clumsy prototype.
The first version of any revolutionary technology is powerful but often frustrating to use. It proves to the world what is possible. By observing how real people struggle with that first product, you get to build the version that is truly useful. You don't have to invent the category; you just have to perfect the user experience within it.
So stop obsessing about being the absolute first.
Instead, look for the company that is doing the hard work of creating a new market right now. Their struggle is your greatest strategic advantage.
Let them find the opportunity. You go build the business.