It’s been over two weeks since the election night. I feel now it is a good time to revisit the Trump victory since the intense defiance of his personal characters have somewhat died down among the general public. Needless to say, the election result was puzzling to many, especially if you are getting most of your news from the mainstream media. I was quite shocked when I realized Trump was going to win, but to be honest, something about the way he ran the campaign reminded me about many Silicon Valley startups. Perhaps I always knew he was going to shock the world.

But why? Why did Trump win really? Why did the mainstream media and most of the population in America fail to see that?

The obvious and hard to swallow answer is we were biased toward Trump. But what exactly was our bias? I don’t think it was biased in any sense to call out Donald Trump for saying or doing unusual and embarrassing things. In fact, I could argue it was a planned strategy by Trump to redirect the public attention to areas that do not genuinely involved politics. I remember The New York Times has published an article after the election called What 2016 Taught Us, in which it claimed the secret of the Trump victory is “Hate Sells.” You see, that’s the bias we had. We lost the election, and we didn’t even know why. What? You asked. How is that biased? Well, before I answer that, let’s look at an examples first.

In 1994, the number of internet users had grown 2000 times worldwide from the previous year. Most of the then software giants like Microsoft or IBM completely missed the opportunity to develop any online products. In fact, almost none of them even had a homepage. Do people know nothing about the exploding number of internet users? Certainly not. They just didn’t really know how to plan for a profitable online product. Jeff Bezos didn’t care. He dared to do one thing few others did — entering the unknown. In case you don’t know who this guy is, he founded Amazon.

In 1995, before Microsoft even released the IE browser, Amazon started to sell books online. Bezos gave the market over a million options with cheaper prices. How did he do it? You might ask. Well, he didn’t. When the product was announced, he had no idea how to pull it off. This means if the order came in, Amazon’s employee might have to buy a book from a physical store and sell it at a lower price to the customers. Guess what, all of the employees at Amazon had to work non-stop in the first week. Some of them even slept in the office. At the end, they only sent out 5% of the orders. Then, something crazy happened. Jerry Yang, the CEO of Yahoo, reached out to Bezos and asked if Bezos would consider listing Amazon on Yahoo’s homepage. Yahoo was at the time the front page of the entire internet. Almost everyone would first visit its homepage and use the links provided to discover the rest of the internet. The engineers at Amazon would describe listing Amazon on Yahoo’s homepage as drinking from the fire hydrant. Bezos replied, “Do it.”

When Amazon started to sell kitchen supplies, they didn’t have the distribution equipment. When Amazon started to sell toys, they had to buy toys from Toys “R” Us with credit cards. Yes, pretty much all the Amazon’s new adventures seemed crazy enough at the time, and yes, many of them failed badly. Fire phone, for example, only got Amazon burned. Take the opportunity to get in to the battle field first, then worry about how to survive. This seems to be Bezos’ core philosophy, a widely despised philosophy. From getting Harvard’s MBA students’ suggestion to sell Amazon to Barnes & Noble to becoming the owner of the second largest company worldwide, Jeff didn’t seem to care what most people thought of him.

You might say, oh I get it, so the bias towards Trump is really that we think he is a complete idiot and had no chance of winning. No no no. Whether we have bias towards Trump is beyond the point of this article. What I really want to say is, sometimes we have to just go with the opportunity even when we have little idea how to survive. And don’t care about if you win. It will eventually happen.