Sometimes it takes an example from outside your professional context to give you perspective on how strange things are within your chosen industry. On a recent episode of Compounders, Greg Dean, the lead investor at Langdon Equity Partners, contrasted the way technology companies invest in new people and products with how investment firms add new people and strategies. The idea was that if an Apple engineer identified a product niche that could tap into a $1 billion TAM, the company would never tell that person to first get to $100 million in revenue before investing in people or R&D. No product would ever get built under that framework. And, in that scenario, the engineers would quickly recognize that they were unlikely to be successful operating with no resources and promptly give up.