The Thiel Monopoly Rule — and the Inversion Path: Niche to Control Consequence

I didn’t start small. I started at the top of the food chain.

I started inside the largest, most liquid, most competitive arena—not because it was the easiest place to win, but because it was the fastest place to learn what’s real.

When you start in the biggest market, you don’t get to hide behind a story.

You learn quickly:

• what is noise

• what is structural

• what “edge” actually means when the opposition is fully staffed and fully capitalized

Then I did something most people don’t understand until later:

I began to isolate.

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Not by narrowing my ambition, but by narrowing the causal surface area—cutting away everything that didn’t reliably produce consequence.

That’s how you eventually arrive at a niche so tight it becomes a singularity:

an omega point where the system reduces to what actually moves it.

For me, that singularity is authorship.

Big → small → big again is not confusion. It’s a complete map.

Later, I lived in Asia—smaller markets, different constraints, different social and economic structures—and something clicked:

Starting from “small” can be useful, but only if you already know what the big game is.

Because the real difficulty for an individual operator isn’t creating a niche.

It’s this:

Your niche must scale without becoming diluted.

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Companies have venture capital, boards, advisors, distribution teams—external machinery that helps them expand.

An individual doesn’t.

So if you’re alone, you need something else:

You need a learning curve that teaches you exactly where the niche fits, where it breaks, where it expands cleanly, and where it becomes fragile.

That’s what the big→small→big loop gives you.

This is why I can operate in the most competitive arena—and make it look seamless.

I’ve touched almost every school of thought:

macro, flows, positioning, technicals, narratives, regimes—everything people use to explain price after the fact.

And because I started in the deep end, I didn’t just learn the theories.

I learned their limits.

So when I say “authorship” is a niche, I don’t mean “small.”

I mean:

It’s the monopoly layer.

A narrow causal wedge that can expand outward—accounts, instruments, sessions, windows—without losing its shape.

Thiel’s rule is still right:

Start small, monopolize, expand.

My difference is that I took the long way around first—so when I found the niche, I already knew exactly how far it could scale.