The Fifth Horseman
TWO MONTHS LATER, I got a call from an editor at Fast Company magazine
who needed a story. “We’re looking to do a big piece on Samsung,” he said.
“We have an invitation to visit the campus in Suwon. How about it?”
Like Jobs two decades before me, I disembarked from the black
company car on a chilly autumn day and was greeted by similar platoons of
bowing Samsung executives in suits. Bucking South Korean corporate
tradition, I began to ask pointed questions of executives far older than me.
We feasted on the same kinds of Korean food and had passionate
conversations about the future of the tech industry and Samsung’s role in it.
The general personality of the company—its admiration of successful ideas
and its drive to chase, learn, and adopt them—hadn’t changed.
The “four horsemen” of Silicon Valley at the time, the four companies
whose impact on technology overshadowed everyone else’s, were Amazon,
Apple, Google, and Facebook. In 2013 TechCrunch’s M. G. Siegler
declared there should be a fifth horseman: Samsung.
“Not only is it bigger than Apple from a revenue standpoint,” he wrote,
“it’s almost twice as large as the three other ‘horsemen’ combined ($190
billion in revenue versus what should be [in 2012] about $100 billion for
Amazon, Facebook, and Google. And unlike Amazon and Facebook which
make little or no profit, Samsung is hugely profitable.”
B.C. Lee’s far-fetched experiment in chipsets had been vindicated.
Samsung, the butt of the technology world’s jokes just two decades earlier,
had leaped out of nowhere to become the designer of just about every type
of premium electronic device in the world, as well as the parts inside them.
With the company spending more than the entire economy of Iceland on
marketing, Samsung’s logo was everywhere: in Times Square, at the