Silicon Valley has been birthing renegade technology companies for the better part of a century, a storied lineage that traces from Stanford’s Fred Terman to the Varian brothers’ Klystron amplifier, from the hallowed garage of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard to the bold “traitorous eight” who fled Shockley Labs to form Fairchild Semiconductor. These companies, to be sure, broke new science and engineering ground—yet their most lasting legacy may well be their pioneering approach to business itself. They blazed a path that led to Intel, Apple, Oracle, Genentech, Gilead, Sun, Adobe, Cisco, Yahoo, eBay, Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, and many, many others. What causes a fledgling company to break through and prosper? At the highest level, the blueprint is always the same.