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I have a better question: Imagine you have at least 15 competitors. Some of whom have been around for years. All of whom have more money than you, and same amou

I have a better question: Imagine you have at least 15 competitors. Some of whom have been around for years. All of whom have more money than you, and same amount of reach (no... more than you). However you think they all suck and you can do better. Why? If you can answer the why, you have a solid idea. That why is what everyone is looking for. Side note: When joining a startup you ask that question. Basically think Google. Google was the first search engine to make search fast and accurate. They had probably 10 competitors, 1 of which, yahoo, was thought to be immovable.

timr 15y ago
"Imagine you have at least 15 competitors. Some of whom have been around for years. All of whom have more money than you, and same amount of reach (no... more than you). However you think they all suck and you can do better. Why? If you can answer the why, you have a solid idea. That why is what everyone is looking for." You know what's funny about that, though? Larry and Sergey wouldn't have had a great answer for that question when they started. They had a relatively primitive technology demo, and were taking on massive competitors with deep pockets (hell, even they tried to sell the idea before they gave in and started Google). There's absolutely no reason that one of the major search companies couldn't have focused their resources on search, come up with something similar to PageRank, and smothered Google in the crib. They just didn't. Oops. Frequently, the correct answer to your question is: "our competitors are bureaucratic and slow, and while our approach could be replicated by any good, two-person team, history suggests that won't happen"...but that always seems to be the hardest answer to sell. Everyone is looking for the deterministic solution to the problem of innovation, when the solution is actually stochastic.
- stellar678 15y ago
  I think this might be because it's only with the hindsight of having access to good-quality search that we see how important search was going to become. If you're solving a problem that your stronger competitors could be solving, and everyone knows that it's a valuable problem that needs to be solved, they'll probably squash you. Or be willing to buy when you offer up your solution.
- vidarh 15y ago
  Google's advantage was cultural: They went into it looking for an algorithmic solution where Yahoo was dead set in a belief on curated results and Altavista and others were dead set in changing user behavior. Indeed, Altavista results were for a long time very much better than Google's for power users that understood how to use their operators. This is not something you just change, and it was a very real benefit for Google (but perhaps one that was difficult to see). So I'd argue that the answer wasn't bureaucratic and slow, but "our competitors are set in their ways". No matter how nimble you are, if you've stared yourself blind on your own perceived solution of a problem, you might be unable to react to the challenge of some little startup coming in and solving the problem in a different way. You might even have tied yourself down with partners etc. in ways that makes changing your model incredibly much harder even if you do realize.
  - gnosis 15y ago
    When Google came on the scene, it wasn't competing with Yahoo, since Yahoo wasn't a search engine but rather just a structured collection of links. Google's main competitor was Altavista. I don't know why everyone else switched from Altavista to Google, but I can tell you that for me it wasn't because of Google's much-vaunted "page rank" algorithm (I certainly didn't notice any improvement in the search results over Altavista). I had two reasons for switching: 1 - Google had no ads, versus tons of ads on Altavista. 2 - Google was very fast. These two factors made choosing Google over Altavista a no-brainer for me. I'm convinced that if Altavista had restrained themselves from serving up ads along with their search results, Google would have been dead in the water.
    - vidarh 15y ago
      Oh, yes, they were most definitively competing with Yahoo too, since Yahoo was the first port of call for non-technical users. Altavista was too complex. For me, the speed and lack of ads vs. Altavista was irrelevant. When my friends and I finally switched, it was because the results finally convinced us that spending a lot of time tweaking search queries on Altavista wasn't worth it when Google would give better results on the first query. That realization was a long time coming. Altavista's basic ranking was abysmal, and if you didn't notice any improvement it is probably because you like me knew how to search on Altavista. Regular users didn't. It worked well for technical users because we'd expect to do stuff like add "+term" and "-term" and quote phrases and use and and or. Regular users didn't. I remember a lot of very long back and forth discussions with people I knew about whether or not Google would have a chance, because the above described method worked so well and it seemed so simple to use that it was hard for us to accept that getting non-technical users to use it wouldn't fly. Many of us were convinced that the Altavista model would win out in the long term, and it frustrated some of us (me included) to no end that Google were so stingy with their operator support even after we'd switched. But as the net got flooded with relative beginners who'd type in a single word or two and expect decent results immediately, it rapidly became obvious that Altavista was a dinosaur. Today we see just how much we (and Altavista) overestimated a large part of the user base: Go to search.yahoo.com. Type "google" in the search box. Watch the second search box appear in the results with a "Get straight to your answers here with Yahoo! Search" above it... It's there for a reason: People do indeed search for search engines by name on Yahoo. I first learned of this one when I worked at Yahoo; they had numbers to back it up.
simonw 15y ago
One of the questions in the YC application form succinctly covers this: "What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?"

timr 15y ago

"Imagine you have at least 15 competitors. Some of whom have been around for years. All of whom have more money than you, and same amount of reach (no... more than you). However you think they all suck and you can do better. Why? If you can answer the why, you have a solid idea. That why is what everyone is looking for." You know what's funny about that, though? Larry and Sergey wouldn't have had a great answer for that question when they started. They had a relatively primitive technology demo, and were taking on massive competitors with deep pockets (hell, even they tried to sell the idea before they gave in and started Google). There's absolutely no reason that one of the major search companies couldn't have focused their resources on search, come up with something similar to PageRank, and smothered Google in the crib. They just didn't. Oops. Frequently, the correct answer to your question is: "our competitors are bureaucratic and slow, and while our approach could be replicated by any good, two-person team, history suggests that won't happen"...but that always seems to be the hardest answer to sell. Everyone is looking for the deterministic solution to the problem of innovation, when the solution is actually stochastic.

stellar678 15y ago
I think this might be because it's only with the hindsight of having access to good-quality search that we see how important search was going to become. If you're solving a problem that your stronger competitors could be solving, and everyone knows that it's a valuable problem that needs to be solved, they'll probably squash you. Or be willing to buy when you offer up your solution.
vidarh 15y ago
Google's advantage was cultural: They went into it looking for an algorithmic solution where Yahoo was dead set in a belief on curated results and Altavista and others were dead set in changing user behavior. Indeed, Altavista results were for a long time very much better than Google's for power users that understood how to use their operators. This is not something you just change, and it was a very real benefit for Google (but perhaps one that was difficult to see). So I'd argue that the answer wasn't bureaucratic and slow, but "our competitors are set in their ways". No matter how nimble you are, if you've stared yourself blind on your own perceived solution of a problem, you might be unable to react to the challenge of some little startup coming in and solving the problem in a different way. You might even have tied yourself down with partners etc. in ways that makes changing your model incredibly much harder even if you do realize.
- gnosis 15y ago
  When Google came on the scene, it wasn't competing with Yahoo, since Yahoo wasn't a search engine but rather just a structured collection of links. Google's main competitor was Altavista. I don't know why everyone else switched from Altavista to Google, but I can tell you that for me it wasn't because of Google's much-vaunted "page rank" algorithm (I certainly didn't notice any improvement in the search results over Altavista). I had two reasons for switching: 1 - Google had no ads, versus tons of ads on Altavista. 2 - Google was very fast. These two factors made choosing Google over Altavista a no-brainer for me. I'm convinced that if Altavista had restrained themselves from serving up ads along with their search results, Google would have been dead in the water.
  - vidarh 15y ago
    Oh, yes, they were most definitively competing with Yahoo too, since Yahoo was the first port of call for non-technical users. Altavista was too complex. For me, the speed and lack of ads vs. Altavista was irrelevant. When my friends and I finally switched, it was because the results finally convinced us that spending a lot of time tweaking search queries on Altavista wasn't worth it when Google would give better results on the first query. That realization was a long time coming. Altavista's basic ranking was abysmal, and if you didn't notice any improvement it is probably because you like me knew how to search on Altavista. Regular users didn't. It worked well for technical users because we'd expect to do stuff like add "+term" and "-term" and quote phrases and use and and or. Regular users didn't. I remember a lot of very long back and forth discussions with people I knew about whether or not Google would have a chance, because the above described method worked so well and it seemed so simple to use that it was hard for us to accept that getting non-technical users to use it wouldn't fly. Many of us were convinced that the Altavista model would win out in the long term, and it frustrated some of us (me included) to no end that Google were so stingy with their operator support even after we'd switched. But as the net got flooded with relative beginners who'd type in a single word or two and expect decent results immediately, it rapidly became obvious that Altavista was a dinosaur. Today we see just how much we (and Altavista) overestimated a large part of the user base: Go to search.yahoo.com. Type "google" in the search box. Watch the second search box appear in the results with a "Get straight to your answers here with Yahoo! Search" above it... It's there for a reason: People do indeed search for search engines by name on Yahoo. I first learned of this one when I worked at Yahoo; they had numbers to back it up.

simonw 15y ago

One of the questions in the YC application form succinctly covers this: "What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?"