· Quick Take · 2 min read
Working at the Technical Frontier
The best path to big results is working at the frontier of your domain, where technical breakthroughs create lasting business moats.
If you want big results, the best path is to work at the frontier of your domain. Go where the limits are, where no one ever went further, and push them further yourself. It is hard, and it takes years, but that is where the business moat often is.
Palmer Luckey as a teenager built VR headsets in a trailer. His early prototype already reached the technical frontier of VR: a wide field of view, much lower motion-to-photon delay, 6-DoF tracking, and smart use of off-the-shelf parts to keep costs down. John Carmack was curious and tried it, said it blew other demos away, and showed it to people. And that was how Oculus was born.
After launching rockets successfully, SpaceX didn’t stop there. They tried again and again to achieve the reusable rocket, reasoning that this is the way to make rocket launching commercially feasible. When it succeeded, they went for the next frontier and caught the giant booster on the launch tower with the chopsticks in October 2024. That kind of magical engineering feat put them ahead on launch cadence and cost while others were still working on their one-off rockets.
During COVID, we also saw what focused effort at the frontier can do. Within just a year from the outbreak, in December 2020 we already had the first vaccine with an emergency authorization in the U.S. That was how science could move fast with talent, capital, and clear goals. When having enough energy and resources, you can tilt the odds toward breakthroughs.
Frontier work builds moats. When you solve hard, specific problems, you build things others cannot match, and customers feel it. That edge rarely comes from clever marketing or beautiful packaging, but from technical vision, patient R&D, and the inenguity to integrate them into your products.
However, going to the frontier is risky. You need a strong technical base, and the will to keep working on it even when results are not there yet. You can do everything right and still come up empty-handed. If you can accept that, the frontier is where the long-term wins often happen.
