Peter Thiel, in his book “Zero to One” differentiates between horizontal and vertical growth. He refers to horizontal growth as something that builds or expands on the existing ideas and innovation (going from 1 to n). Vertical growth, on the other hand is about creating something new, something that did not exist earlier (going from 0 to 1)
By definition, almost all start-ups are trying to execute on a vertical thought. They are a bet on a future that exists only in the innovator’s mind.
The cloud – with its scalable, on-demand computing platform – is an ideal horizontal plane on which the vertical progress can be made. It offers speed, scalable costs, real time insights and a host of software vendor partners to supercharge the growth of the startup.
But to succeed, a startup needs more than a modern computing platform. It needs access to a global startup community for its infectious energy, events to spread the word, accelerators to cross-pollinate ideas and mentorship to avoid the most common missteps.
Recently, Google cloud launched a program to provide all of this and more. The details can be found here.
We live in a world of easy access to capital. Every halfway decent idea will get funded. The successful ones will be those that have access to an ecosystem where ideas can be nurtured, tested and fine-tuned. The google startup program intends to offer such a nurturing ecosystem. It is the same ecosystem that generated 9 products with a billion plus users in the last 2 decades.
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