151–160 of 214 posts
> YC startups don’t have to be unique. Far from it. Slow news day. YC has made it clear over the years it's almost all about the founders not the idea. It's almost impossible to know if an idea is good at the early stages, and ideas change, startups pivot, often the timing is wrong, and the market unproven etc. More often than not most of what startups do is not unique, otherwise there's no market for it. A new take…
Steve Jobs or maybe just Apple used to pit teams against each other to develop a solution to a problem and then pick the strongest of the two. It also offers a convenient way to pull investment out early if the doppelganger startup isn't meeting targets. Just get the original startup to buy them out. It's not something that is a negative for YC, but it could be for the startups they back.
I think there's something missing from this analysis - YC companies might duplicate one another's products but that doesn't say anything at all about their target markets, route to market, product focus, etc. As an example, my first startup was a requirements management app that, on paper at least, was a copy of IBM DOORS. Except DOORS is a massive enterprise app targeted at companies who are building a new airplane…
Incidentally, if anyone else wants to reinvent IBM DOORS for ~1000-requirements fields, email me. There's a vast market out there for combined hardware/software shops that are in the no man's land of "not designing an entire literal train from top to bottom" and "not just hiding a Raspberry Pi in a trench coat".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incidentally, if anyone else wants to reinvent IBM DOORS for ~1000-requirements fields, email me. There's a vast market out there for combined hardware/software shops that are in the no man's land of "not designing an entire literal train from top to bottom" and "not just hiding a Raspberry Pi in a trench coat".
Why can’t IBM just sell a watered down “DOORS-lite”?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was nothing like as bad as this 10 years ago, no. Just look at the state of successful exits - it is awful. This is not the same as an ecosystem producing Sun, HP, Apple or even Google, which all had enormous positive externalities.
Yes it was like this for Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook. The difference is that at that time the genius youngster (which is just the son of some already successful people) creating startups were cool. Now nobody wants to make or watch a movie about Sam Altman and OpenAI.
Even the movie about him seems to have made him seem more antisocial and nerdy than he really is. (Based on 3rd party reports about him)
It makes sense. If you are an investor and have a strong belief that a specific product or idea is a good one - you might want to decouple your odds of success from the people/team/company executing that idea.
What's interesting is that the people who are able to predict and come up with the idea (e.g. a researcher using AI in 2021) are often not the best ones to execute on it (typically, lack of experience or capacity to handle the pain of growth while marketing). What's most interesting is that most people aren't just "one type". In your life you go through multiple roles. Just like how most people, regardless of their i…
> YC startups don’t have to be unique. Far from it. Slow news day. YC has made it clear over the years it's almost all about the founders not the idea. It's almost impossible to know if an idea is good at the early stages, and ideas change, startups pivot, often the timing is wrong, and the market unproven etc. More often than not most of what startups do is not unique, otherwise there's no market for it. A new take…
They have shifting and conflicting and nonsensical reasons for what they do. Just like PG lambasting someone as being too stupid to see when they asked why so many YC companies are things that should just be features on other software.
"I'd rather have 2 of something than 0"
> YC startups don’t have to be unique. Far from it. Slow news day. YC has made it clear over the years it's almost all about the founders not the idea. It's almost impossible to know if an idea is good at the early stages, and ideas change, startups pivot, often the timing is wrong, and the market unproven etc. More often than not most of what startups do is not unique, otherwise there's no market for it. A new take…