3 ms·

The subtitle of my book might as well have been "How to compete with me" - I haven't seen any fresh competition, though. I figure that my competition already

by lsc 16y ago

The subtitle of my book might as well have been "How to compete with me" - I haven't seen any fresh competition, though. I figure that my competition already hires people who are smarter and harder working than I am. The fact that I can compete at all means that either that nobody competent wants my market, or that the inefficiencies inherent to large organizations are larger than most people think. I suspect it's a little bit of both. Either way, I'm not going to waste my time keeping my ideas secret. Expressing your ideas clearly has other benefits. The obvious is that you get some feedback before you put effort into development... but what is less obvious is that even if you fail, and /especially/ if someone steals your idea, clearly expressing an interesting idea (especially if you implement) looks good on the resume. Startups come and go, but you are going to have to sell yourself, likely, for the rest of your life. On the other hand, as someone else in the thread said, "I'm a thousandaire!" which pretty accurately describes my current financial situation, so what right do I have to be giving advice?

scorpioxy 16y ago
"either that nobody competent wants my market, or that the inefficiencies inherent to large organizations are larger than most people think." Interesting statement. I'd also add that the know-how might be there, and the market might be there. But the effort to combine the two and actually start your own business is what probably trips most people up.
- lsc 16y ago
  eh, I know of plenty of people with all of those; they just prefer to focus on higher-margin markets. In a business like this, it's kind of a lot of effort to get to the point where you are no longer bleeding capital in to servers (and if you want to compete with me, you would have to buy your servers; none of this on-demand stuff. You could, in fact, get one of the amazon ec2 HVM domains and run paravirt xen out of that, but the costs of ec2 would destroy your margin.) If nothing else, Linode could crush me on price, if they wanted to. I think that it's probably more profitable for them to leave the low end to me and capture the next bracket up through superior features/support/etc... so it comes back to the 'nobody wants my market' statement.

by lsc 16y ago

scorpioxy 16y ago

"either that nobody competent wants my market, or that the inefficiencies inherent to large organizations are larger than most people think." Interesting statement. I'd also add that the know-how might be there, and the market might be there. But the effort to combine the two and actually start your own business is what probably trips most people up.

lsc 16y ago
eh, I know of plenty of people with all of those; they just prefer to focus on higher-margin markets. In a business like this, it's kind of a lot of effort to get to the point where you are no longer bleeding capital in to servers (and if you want to compete with me, you would have to buy your servers; none of this on-demand stuff. You could, in fact, get one of the amazon ec2 HVM domains and run paravirt xen out of that, but the costs of ec2 would destroy your margin.) If nothing else, Linode could crush me on price, if they wanted to. I think that it's probably more profitable for them to leave the low end to me and capture the next bracket up through superior features/support/etc... so it comes back to the 'nobody wants my market' statement.