I spent a full week of January staring at the largest companies by market cap, and I have to say my business outlook has become much clearer. Consuming only Silicon Valley content is like teaching someone about a few of all the amazing colors, it’s great to learn about them but to understand them better you definitely want to contrast them with the other existing ones.

You’d be surprised (at least I was) by how many companies you’ve barely heard of that have huge volumes of traction or companies that you know but didn’t anticipate the scale of which they operate at.

After absorbing this list for a while, I think it’s probably appropriate to say that market cap can be thought of as the combination of societal infrastructure that holds our civilization together and the markets that are still growing to provide goods and services.

Internalizing these businesses, the traditional ones like oil and gas, and the new ones that recently emerged from technology like Microsoft or Apple and why they’re at close levels when it comes to market cap is very valuable. Our whole economy fundamentally is built around basic needs like food, drinks, medicine, transportation, energy, finance, etc.

Companies reflect and mirror those needs with their market caps, the higher the gap they fill the higher the volume they operate at and hence the transaction volume. Almost all the new (on a large time scale) valuable companies have created their own new markets and made the pie much bigger.

This observation really helped me distinguish a lot between cool tech and side projects that would make university professors happy, and actual businesses that would make a huge ROI for investors while changing the world.

In some parallel universe, businesses can be thought of as orange stands, with the rest implemented for efficiency. Electric cars or nuclear reactors market caps are only justifiable because of the value they create and provide for the world, and not just because they’re cool tech.

This is another thing that I’m trying to unlearn, which is that not all cutting edge technology and science correlates with value provided to the world; they usually operate under their own graphs. That being said, it’s always great to ask what changes with each new paradigm. You don’t want to open the next wood oven pizza restaurant in Naples, nor the next burger place in Montreal.

Finally, I was surprised by how poorly the financials of some critical companies like Boeing are, but that’s an essay for another day.