11–20 of 29 posts
Because the reality is that 99% of a startup’s success is in the boring grind of doing marketing, sales, development, customer support, accounting, on and on.
Actually making the simple app is the easiest part of the process, and always has been, even before AI.
Check out the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff which tells us what the Carrying Capicity of a group for risk takers is. Its never been high. Maybe 5% of any population. Out of which 4.99% fail. With those odds populations cant have everyone taking risk. Such populations sooner or later go extinct.
Attention Economy/Social Media/News Media realized risk taking captures attention. It helps Elon to raise funds, mesmerize customers and employee etc before anything is even built. So everyone starts signalling they are risk takers when really its about something else.
Nobody can steal your identity, attitude, communication with clients and support. And usually, this is what makes the difference.
And there are also other, legal ways to protect things, even though it is expensive. It is to patent your products and ideas. :)
People tried creating alternatives for MS Office, over the decades. Didn't succeed. Not because of technical moat. Some companies like Google reworked internet serach problem. They succeeded because of technical moat (page-ranking) and later they quickly moved on to the more common moat - user base, supply chain hijacking (ads) and branding. Social media firms hardly have any technical moat. They 100% rely on locking…
Copying technology is easy. But "business ≠ technology".
Thats the point. Its all about how much risk you are willing to take. Thats what startups are supposed to represent - the risk takers of the population for whom the story has a high likelihood it wont end happily ever after. Check out the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff which tells us what the Carrying Capicity of a group for risk takers is. Its never been high. Maybe 5% of any population. Out of which 4.99% fail. With thos…
Not trying to be a jerk, but there is a logical fallacy here. If you've ever read the Selfish Gene the central idea is that there is a common misunderstanding that animals/societies evolve for "the good of the population". A population is better understood as a collection of individuals with each being a collection of genes, and really it is each gene that is trying to replicate itself. Applying it to your example, a risk-taking gene with .998% chance of failure would probably not replicate itself successfully, unless the .002% of individuals that succeed were quite prolific at procreation. The good of the population does not really come into it.