Success Quote by Trip Hawkins

Hawkins is doing the classic Silicon Valley two-step: admit the product isn’t perfect while framing that imperfection as proof of inevitability. “I’m not saying that more performance wouldn’t be better” sounds candid, even humble, but it’s also a preemptive strike against critics. He concedes the pain point (performance) only to neutralize it with a storyline investors and early adopters love: today’s flaws are temporary tuition for tomorrow’s dominance.

The real payload is in “that’s the difference between first generation and second generation.” It’s less an observation than a business strategy disguised as common sense. First generation becomes a sacrificial category: allowed to be clunky, expensive, or incomplete because it functions as a beachhead. Second generation, in this mythos, arrives with the kinks worked out, the costs lowered, the market educated, and the ecosystem already leaning in. The quote is selling patience, but also momentum: don’t judge the tech by what it is now; judge it by the upgrade curve you’re expected to believe in.

Contextually, this is the language of an industry that ships early, then iterates in public. Hawkins, as a businessman in tech’s formative decades, is speaking to an audience conditioned to treat “version 1” as a promise rather than a product. The subtext is confidence without liability: if the bet pays off, he saw the future; if it doesn’t, it was “just first generation.”