A doctor developed a piece of software in 1994 — a fully functional medical database that worked flawlessly. He had the complete first-mover advantage here, decades before Google, Facebook or WebMD existed, and long before smartphones. He digitalised the patient-centred care concept, and at that point, he was sitting on an absolute goldmine. The obvious next step, following the classic Silicon Valley playbook, was to patent the underlying logic, aggressively scale it, raise lots of venture capital, and become incredibly rich. However, he just pulled the plug.

He actively stops promoting it entirely, yes, just shut it down, and the reason was that he realised that your brilliant invention is actually terrifying people. You know, it is the ultimate subversion of that whole tech founder narrative we are so conditioned to revere— that 'move fa ...