Threading the Needle
One of the best examples of a mature “American Dynamism” company is Amazon. It's heavily enmeshed with the physical and digital world; it's multi-product in multiple end markets; and it tackled the most difficult parts of the business with a full stack approach.
Amazon became the Everything Store, and then much more, by pioneering a strategy multiple AD companies have adopted: the focus on an initial 100x product that generates immediate revenue and customer relationships. The revenue funds R&D and a path towards positive cash flow, while customer relationships provide distribution and a competitive moat. Together they offer a path to sequence the company from A to Z.
I call this process Threading the Needle, and more entrepreneurs are employing it to become full-stack, multi-product startups like Tesla, SpaceX, and Anduril each did. The challenge is identifying the proper starting point. For Tesla, it was Roadster, for SpaceX it was Falcon 1, and for Anduril it was Sentry. Each provided real revenue and customer relationships that let them deliver more products to an increasing share of their respective industry. And that starting point gave them an extensible platform from which to do it.
Entrepreneurs are delivering technology to more of the world, and Threading the Needle is one of the ways they're accomplishing that. After all, Amazon couldn't immediately be the Everything Store; Bezos just started with books.
