Apple has never launched anything the world had not seen before.

MP3 players → iPod, 2001
Smartphones → iPhone, 2007
Wireless earbuds → AirPods, 2016
Folding phones → iPhone Duo, this Wednesday

Every one existed before Apple touched it. Clumsy, half finished, sold by someone who had spent years explaining it to a market that did not want it yet.

Samsung has shipped folding phones since 2019. Seven years of hinge failures, screen creases and jokes. Seven years of teaching people what a foldable is.

Apple watched all of it. Then it walked in at $1,999 with a phone that fixes the complaints Samsung spent seven years collecting.

That is the model. It has three parts.

Let someone else pay to teach the market.
Let someone else make the mistakes in public.
Arrive when the customer already understands the product, and finish it better than the one who taught them.

It works. Last quarter Apple took 49 percent of every smartphone dollar on earth from 23 percent of the phones.

Being first is not an advantage. It is a tax. Apple built its entire model around never paying it.

Most founders I meet are proud of being first. Was proud of it myself once, and paid for it. Teaching a market costs money, and the ones who teach are rarely the ones who collect.

Apple has never been first and keeps winning anyway.

Is being first worth it,or is the smarter play to let someone else teach the market and walk in second?

 𝗞𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗵𝗻𝗮 𝗟𝗮𝗸𝗮𝗺𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗶 | 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿 | 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿 | I write at the intersection of AI, capital, and the future of the human job market ,
sharing my life lessons, reflections, and honest takes from the founder-investor's seat.