People in business, especially tech, love progress and innovation. They believe they’re the ones dragging the world forward while everyone else clings to the past. But for decades, they’ve been too narrowly focused on their own projects, on funding a new battery, or coding a new app, or building a better venture capital business. The most successful people become so good at one thing that they forget about the broader conditions that make progress possible in the first place.
But now we, and they, are finding out that the background matters more than anyone thought. Try starting a company that depends on global supply chains when trade wars flare up overnight. Try convincing the best machine learning researchers in the world to join you when immigration policies make it nearly impossible for them to get visas. Try raising a billion-dollar round when investors can’t predict what the government will do next week about taxes, tariffs, or regulations. Suddenly, the things they assumed were fixed, like the rule of law, fairness, and open markets, look less like constants and more like fragile variables.
“How did this happen?” they ask. “We were just building our business.”