Success Quote by Trip Hawkins

Market share is supposed to signal dominance; Hawkins flips it into a symptom of anxiety. The line reads like a founder’s confession, and it lands because it punctures the heroic story companies tell about “defending the franchise.” Fear is the real operating system: fear of the upstart with a better product, fear of being unbundled, fear that customers aren’t loyal so much as briefly captive.

Trip Hawkins isn’t theorizing from a distance. As the founder of Electronic Arts and a key figure in the fast-cycle world of consumer software and games, he lived inside an industry where yesterday’s hit becomes tomorrow’s punchline. In that context, “hang on” is doing heavy work: it implies clawing, not leading. Market share becomes something you grip, not something you earn anew. The intent is less moral judgment than strategic warning. The moment a company’s identity collapses into protecting a percentage, it starts optimizing for defense: risk committees, brand-policing, hostile lock-in tactics, and incremental updates sold as breakthroughs.

The subtext is that fear can be productive up to a point. It sharpens focus, forces vigilance, keeps the organization from romanticizing its own incumbency. But Hawkins’ phrasing also hints at the trap: fear biases decision-making toward short-term preservation. It makes companies treat innovation like a threat rather than a tool, and competitors like pests rather than teachers. In markets driven by taste and technology, that’s how leaders become museums: carefully curated, heavily guarded, and quietly irrelevant.