Engage as in "treat it as important?" IMO first mover advantage is even less worthfull than "ideas." Two reasons: One, first mover advantages rarely determine

Engage as in "treat it as important?" IMO first mover advantage is even less worthfull than "ideas." Two reasons: One, first mover advantages rarely determine winners. Google followed altavista. FB followed Myspace. iphone followed N95s, palm pilot, blackberry, etc. Those earlier versions also had precedents, and for each precedent there are hundreds of attempts at creating commercial products. Second, timescales. The above examples are years and decades. The typical founder pushing NDAs on everyone and their cat is thinking in months. There are almost no cases where someone is going to entrench themselves in an industry or create network effect in months. If they do, it's probably down to great execution anyway. It's not that first mover advantage doesn't exist, it's just a smaller factor relative to execution. Competition generally, is unlikely to be a major factor. Also "major" and "minor" are a different sort of beast for a startup. Statistically, a startup has a very low chance of success. Say the chance of success is 5%. You can think of that as 50% chance of not being executed at all. 30% chance of being executed poorly. 10% chance of failing to appeal to customers/users. 2% chance of dying because of founder disputes. 1% chance of being a stupid idea. 0.5% chance of being killed by competition. etc.