Tencent

Tencent started in 1998 with OICQ, a clone of ICQ instant messaging, generating zero revenue in year one. Today it's an $80 billion revenue conglomerate owning WeChat (1.4 billion monthly users), major gaming properties, and perhaps the most defended digital territory in history. The journey involved four major resource gradient shifts over 25 years - each time reallocating away from profitable businesses toward emerging opportunities.

The defining moment came in 2010-2011 when Allen Zhang proposed WeChat to cannibalize their dominant QQ platform. Founder Pony Ma's response exemplifies phototropic discipline: 'If something is going to kill QQ, I hope it's built by Tencent.' They reallocated the majority of mobile engineering from QQ to WeChat within 18 months, growing from 50 million users to 1.4 billion monthly actives by 2025.

WeChat became the most expensive territory to invade in digital history. The super-app ecosystem encompasses messaging, payments (900 million users), social (800 million daily), and 4+ million mini-programs. Tencent spends approximately $11 billion annually on territorial defense - subsidies for mini-programs, merchants, content, and features - protecting $36 billion in territory value. Network effects create increasing returns to defense: the more users and mini-programs, the harder invasion becomes. Tencent demonstrates that sustainable competitive advantage comes from willingness to cannibalize yourself before competitors can.