The Second Company Into a Market Usually Wins It

In the spring of 2003, Reid Hoffman sat in a meeting and listened to someone pitch him on a professional networking site. Hoffman, who would go on to co-found LinkedIn, had actually been thinking about the same idea. But the pitch came from a company called Ryze, which had launched two years earlier and already had a few hundred thousand users. Hoffman passed on investing in Ryze. Then he went and…