My two cents, heavily influenced by Blank's book :) While any sentence-long description will be an oversimplification, I think fitting everything under the sun

My two cents, heavily influenced by Blank's book :) While any sentence-long description will be an oversimplification, I think fitting everything under the sun in a "1st way" is counterproductive. If all we're talking about is how they succeed with Ron's components in mind, then there are at least a few ways. I see the the need-being-met thing as a spectrum. The more unmet the need is, the less likely competition is a problem at that moment, so just solving it is sufficient (who knew having a car was actually a 'problem' versus purchasing transit from 'a' to 'b'?) I've also seen that sometimes a product that focuses on a niche and does it REALLY well is better (for that niche) and NOT cheaper, but they succeed too (e.g. Veeva). Sometimes a product that focuses on the lower end of the market is cheaper and not better (i.e. functionality) but ppl underestimate the long-tail of non-users. (maybe like Gusto vs. traditional payroll providers or RelateIQ vs. Salesforce) On acquisitions, I've heard that acquihires usually make little-to-no money for the investors. But as beambot also mentioned, the business could be acquired for hard tech that, even if no customers/bizmodel, some other business would find value in having (maybe like Facebook>Friendfeed or Linkedin>RunHop). But to reverse engineer that from day 1 I imagine would be even harder than building a product to an unmet need haha. You don't know if the bigger co is working on it internally or if they'd scoop up somebody else. Wonder if this was Meerkat's plan, gone awry <-- speculation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.