Epictetus had an iron lamp stolen and decided the fear of losing it had been the real cost. Here are a hundred lamps and a ten‑year clock, built from every medical device category the FDA has opened since 1980. Press play and watch how many stay yours.
Primary source: Epictetus, Discourses I.18.15 (Oldfather trans.) — the stolen iron lamp
Grounding data: MIMI Labs · FDA 510(k) Premarket Notification database, 2,772 categories opened 1980–2026
Every 510(k) device gets a product code — a category. Somebody is always first into one. The FDA file then records, in public, exactly when a different company cleared into the same category.
Each square below is one percent of the 2,772 categories opened since 1980. Navy means the company that opened it still has it to themselves. Red means somebody else has arrived.
Month 0year 0
Still yours alone100
Somebody else has it0
first company still alonea second company has cleared1 square = 1% of 2,772 categories
Press play, or drag the month slider.
What the clock shows
Milestones, straight from the file
By month 12: 612 of 2,772 categories — 22% — already had a second company.
By month 24: 923 — 33%. By month 60: 1,397 — 50%.
By month 120: 1,673 — 60%. Another 164 arrive after year ten.
935 categories — 34% — have never picked up a second company. That is the honest counterweight to the whole argument, and it is the biggest single group in the file. Some ideas really do stay yours. Most don’t.
Among the categories that were entered by somebody else, the median gap was 750 days — two years and change. A hundred and ten of them had company inside the first month.
The 80/20 lens
Across all 38,822 clearances inside those 2,772 categories, the company that opened the category ended up holding 10.7% of them.
One clearance in ten. Being first is worth about a year of quiet and a tenth of the category — and it is worth that whether or not you guarded it, because the 510(k) summary is a public document by design. The protection was never doing the work.
Where this is thin
Right-censoring. A category opened in 2019 has had six years to be entered; one opened in 1985 has had forty. The 34% “never” group is therefore too big — some of those categories will be entered next year. The clock above only runs to ten years, which limits but does not remove the problem.
A product code is not a product. FDA categories are administrative buckets that get split, merged and renamed. “Second company in the category” is a reasonable proxy for “somebody else made your thing,” not a measurement of it. Applicants are matched on raw company-name text, so an acquisition or a reincorporation can read as a new entrant.
The squares are quantiles, not cases. Each square flips at the month where the real cumulative curve crosses its percentile. It is an exact rendering of the distribution and a fictional rendering of any individual category — no single square is a real device.
This measures clearance, not building. The clock starts when a company files with the FDA, not when somebody opens an editor. The newsletter’s claim is that the cost of a build has collapsed; this file cannot show that. What it shows is the older, slower version of the same fact — even when a build took a year and a purchase order, the artifact was never the scarce part.
Take it out of the folder
The lamp story has a footnote. After Epictetus died, a collector paid a small fortune for the earthenware lamp, convinced the wisdom would reach him by its light. He bought the crockery of a man whose entire teaching was that the crockery is worthless.
Somebody will always want the lamp. Nobody has ever worked out how to steal the reading.
The median category in this file gave its founder two years and one clearance in ten. Whatever is sitting in your folder is holding less than that, and it is holding it against nobody at all. Send it ugly this week.