The Anna Karenina Principle and Voltage Effect: Scalable ideas are all alike; every unscalable idea is unscalable in its own way

One thing all great ideas have in common is that they are not guaranteed to succeed.

Leo Tolstoy began his novel Anna Karenina with the famous opening line “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Geographer Jared Diamond popularized the “Anna Karenina principle,” which holds that any one of several shortcomings can guarantee the failure of an idea, while success depends on avoiding all possible sho…