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> What you can control is the market you're in, your team, and the unique insight that you bring as the founder. Your job as a founder is to leverage these stre

> What you can control is the market you're in, your team, and the unique insight that you bring as the founder. Your job as a founder is to leverage these strengths to get to PMF. Agree with everything here except (maybe I'm contrarian) the 'unique insight that you bring as the founder' part. I'm fairly convinced that unique insight is just a VC pitch thing. In reality, the market is too efficient for your 'unique insight' to really benefit you all that much beyond your Seed or Series A pitch. There will almost certainly be plenty of competitors ripping you off and at least one or two funded by other top-tier VCs. If the only thing you have different is your 'authentic unique insight', you're going to lose anyway.

2arrs2ells 4y ago
Your argument is a “unique insight” isn’t enough to provide an enduring competitive advantage (or “moat”). But that’s not what the OP is talking about. A unique insight (and great timing / market) is often enough to get to early PMF (and - like you mention - to Series A).
- enos_feedler 4y ago
  unique insights come from your perspective. It is your unique perspective which is a _factory_ for unique insights that allow you to solve a series of problems that hit your startup/company in succession. It is this durable perspective that has built up through long term experience that can't easily be copied/duplicated that makes you win a market.
robocat 4y ago
> I'm fairly convinced that unique insight is just a VC pitch thing Ask HN: do the great majority of competitors improperly understand the core insights behind a product? When I have been involved with successful products in the past, most competitors were ineffective because to me it seemed they missed something critical to the success of our product. Effective competitors are rare in my experience. Are startups in this decade better at grokking the core insights and improving upon that? Disclaimer: my experience is in the wopwops on the edge of the world (New Zealand), and I am also out of date. Also, it is my impression that what everyone “knows” is important to a product market is often well off the mark (morphic-resonance gone wrong ;-). If lucky, we all finally catch up with the insight that a founder had, but only after the insight has lost its unique value (maybe a few years). The cliché of yelling a valuable idea and nobody hearing it (part of the insight’s value is often that it is misunderstood - sometimes even though it has already been proven valuable!). Obviously the only competitor that would matter is the one that understood the insights. But does that competitor always exist… In a complex dynamic market the efficient market theory is wrong in practice I believe.
- enos_feedler 4y ago
  I linked a video below of Jensen Huang founder of NVIDIA speaking at Stanford. He says at one point in the 90s there were 100s of companies in their space and he goes on to list a series of unique insights/perspectives they had that led to become the last one standing. NVIDIA understood the insights that mattered. I would say a more modern example of this the insight that to build the best mobile phone product, you need to design the hardware, operating system and APIs (and thus first party apps) together as a single thing. Apple brought this insight from their past experience building less sophisticated computers. They knew a phone given it's size and use case would require this to an even _greater_ degree. Google on the other hand, based on their experience of working in open ecosystems and linux machines from server to desktop, thought the phone market would extend from an open OS platform. This was their perspective/insight. Ultimately, the company that won this argument was Apple. We know this because Google has finally adopted this truth that Apple knew all along with the Pixel hardware lineup. Furthermore, the Android phones that succeeded today have nothing to do with the fact they are "Android". Samsung phones are about the Samsung ecosystem. Choosing Android is more important to the OEM than the user because of the app ecosystem that cannot be bootstrapped from scratch any more. Android is the developer/oem platform, not the user platform. Now, think about how long it took Google to finally give in to that insight? These perspectives lead to very stubborn decision making. This perspective was often a debatable thing for a long time. It's no longer. Hence I think everything you said here is right and aligned what what we see in one of the biggest product categories on the planet right now.
  - robocat 4y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn1EsFe7snQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn1EsFe7snQ Amazing video thank you. From ~2009 that keeps hammering the unique perspective topic, especially during formation in 1993 and change of focus in 1998. I would be interested to know which of the failed hundreds of competitors had the same “unique perspective”, but maybe just failed because another leg of the company was too weak. Successful companies have a few core perspectives that they nail with A grades, but they have to get a C grade in all other areas of the business. It can take only one F grade in one topic to make a business fail. The meta-skill of recognising and fixing a critical failing is hard to learn. Edit: I love Jen-Hsun’s definition of a startup starting about 57:50: a startup is an enterprise that is nearly out of business all the time.
enos_feedler 4y ago
If you listen to Jensen Huang, founder on NVIDIA speak at Stanford about how NVIDA was able to succeed as a GPU company when there were many, many companies building graphics cards in the 90s, he has a single answer to the question "Perspective". Unfortunately I can no longer find the video of this lecture. I've tried for months now. I watched it about 10 years ago online and this statement about perspective always stuck with me. He basically says that NVIDIA's/his unique perspective on the graphics chip market and where it was going was what allowed nvidia to succeed in the market where others would fail. The unique insight the founder brings is what differentiates them from other founder/teams going after the same market at the same (right) time. I am not sure what you mean by "market is too efficient", but the market chooses your product because it built with the unique insight that makes it the preferred choice among other choices that were built with less superior insights. If you mean that all companies collapses on the same "efficient" product, this just isn't true. Businesses are not efficient in this regard and are actually very stubborn. Usually by the time it's given that one insight was critical, the company that began with it has an insurmountable lead. EDIT: I found the video. It even has a labelled section called "perspective and why it matters". My memory was bad and that he was using yahoo and search engine as an example here. But the point stands. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn1EsFe7snQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn1EsFe7snQ EDIT EDIT: He does follow on to talk about GPUs and competition in 1995 and why perspective matters. My memory is on point. Phew. Such a good video. Watching again.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  What a great video. We need more like these, direct founder perspectives with no bullshit. Any other examples you like?
- egman_ekki 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing, really curious to watch the video now. What I’m wondering before I do, though, is whether this isn’t that just an instance of survivorship bias? If there was another winner in the GPU space, you could be sharing video of someone else’s unique perspective, no? Related, there was a rather interesting episode in the Netflix documentary about gaming industry history (High Score, E4 This is War). The episode is about Sega console and how it succeeded over Nintendo and others. It shows the strategy of the Sega CEO and I’ve wondered since then if the strategy of the CEO was just his genius, luck of the market circumstances, or just survivorship bias.
snowypine 4y ago
Unique insight can also mean something that you deeply believe that isn't obvious on the surface. E.g. Doordash with their suburb strategy - I'm sure lots of other delivery companies heard about suburbs. None of them took it seriously enough to really invest heavily into suburbs. And, Doordash is now one of the top delivery companies.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Lower density means longer delivery trips and fewer orders delivered in one trip. It was (and still is) a higher-hanging fruit than delivery in dense cities, maybe requiring deeper pockets than, say, GrubHub / Seamless had.
rdli 4y ago
In my experience, the founder(s) are one of the few people who will be able to push and innovate as others start to copy you. I think PMF is a continuum and what is PMF for $1M ARR is highly unlikely to be sufficient to get you to $10M ARR which will require more evolution to get to $25M ARR.
cowpig 4y ago
> the market is too efficient for your 'unique insight' to really benefit you all that much beyond your Seed or Series A pitch It feels like the HN community combines a poor understanding of economics with a religious-like capitalist zeal into beliefs that, at least to my eyes, appear absurd or even farcical. Is everyone the same? Do they all have access to the same information at the same time? Do conditions never change in asymmetric ways?

2arrs2ells 4y ago

Your argument is a “unique insight” isn’t enough to provide an enduring competitive advantage (or “moat”). But that’s not what the OP is talking about. A unique insight (and great timing / market) is often enough to get to early PMF (and - like you mention - to Series A).

enos_feedler 4y ago
unique insights come from your perspective. It is your unique perspective which is a _factory_ for unique insights that allow you to solve a series of problems that hit your startup/company in succession. It is this durable perspective that has built up through long term experience that can't easily be copied/duplicated that makes you win a market.

robocat 4y ago

> I'm fairly convinced that unique insight is just a VC pitch thing Ask HN: do the great majority of competitors improperly understand the core insights behind a product? When I have been involved with successful products in the past, most competitors were ineffective because to me it seemed they missed something critical to the success of our product. Effective competitors are rare in my experience. Are startups in this decade better at grokking the core insights and improving upon that? Disclaimer: my experience is in the wopwops on the edge of the world (New Zealand), and I am also out of date. Also, it is my impression that what everyone “knows” is important to a product market is often well off the mark (morphic-resonance gone wrong ;-). If lucky, we all finally catch up with the insight that a founder had, but only after the insight has lost its unique value (maybe a few years). The cliché of yelling a valuable idea and nobody hearing it (part of the insight’s value is often that it is misunderstood - sometimes even though it has already been proven valuable!). Obviously the only competitor that would matter is the one that understood the insights. But does that competitor always exist… In a complex dynamic market the efficient market theory is wrong in practice I believe.

enos_feedler 4y ago
I linked a video below of Jensen Huang founder of NVIDIA speaking at Stanford. He says at one point in the 90s there were 100s of companies in their space and he goes on to list a series of unique insights/perspectives they had that led to become the last one standing. NVIDIA understood the insights that mattered. I would say a more modern example of this the insight that to build the best mobile phone product, you need to design the hardware, operating system and APIs (and thus first party apps) together as a single thing. Apple brought this insight from their past experience building less sophisticated computers. They knew a phone given it's size and use case would require this to an even _greater_ degree. Google on the other hand, based on their experience of working in open ecosystems and linux machines from server to desktop, thought the phone market would extend from an open OS platform. This was their perspective/insight. Ultimately, the company that won this argument was Apple. We know this because Google has finally adopted this truth that Apple knew all along with the Pixel hardware lineup. Furthermore, the Android phones that succeeded today have nothing to do with the fact they are "Android". Samsung phones are about the Samsung ecosystem. Choosing Android is more important to the OEM than the user because of the app ecosystem that cannot be bootstrapped from scratch any more. Android is the developer/oem platform, not the user platform. Now, think about how long it took Google to finally give in to that insight? These perspectives lead to very stubborn decision making. This perspective was often a debatable thing for a long time. It's no longer. Hence I think everything you said here is right and aligned what what we see in one of the biggest product categories on the planet right now.
- robocat 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn1EsFe7snQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn1EsFe7snQ Amazing video thank you. From ~2009 that keeps hammering the unique perspective topic, especially during formation in 1993 and change of focus in 1998. I would be interested to know which of the failed hundreds of competitors had the same “unique perspective”, but maybe just failed because another leg of the company was too weak. Successful companies have a few core perspectives that they nail with A grades, but they have to get a C grade in all other areas of the business. It can take only one F grade in one topic to make a business fail. The meta-skill of recognising and fixing a critical failing is hard to learn. Edit: I love Jen-Hsun’s definition of a startup starting about 57:50: a startup is an enterprise that is nearly out of business all the time.

enos_feedler 4y ago

If you listen to Jensen Huang, founder on NVIDIA speak at Stanford about how NVIDA was able to succeed as a GPU company when there were many, many companies building graphics cards in the 90s, he has a single answer to the question "Perspective". Unfortunately I can no longer find the video of this lecture. I've tried for months now. I watched it about 10 years ago online and this statement about perspective always stuck with me. He basically says that NVIDIA's/his unique perspective on the graphics chip market and where it was going was what allowed nvidia to succeed in the market where others would fail. The unique insight the founder brings is what differentiates them from other founder/teams going after the same market at the same (right) time. I am not sure what you mean by "market is too efficient", but the market chooses your product because it built with the unique insight that makes it the preferred choice among other choices that were built with less superior insights. If you mean that all companies collapses on the same "efficient" product, this just isn't true. Businesses are not efficient in this regard and are actually very stubborn. Usually by the time it's given that one insight was critical, the company that began with it has an insurmountable lead. EDIT: I found the video. It even has a labelled section called "perspective and why it matters". My memory was bad and that he was using yahoo and search engine as an example here. But the point stands. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn1EsFe7snQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn1EsFe7snQ EDIT EDIT: He does follow on to talk about GPUs and competition in 1995 and why perspective matters. My memory is on point. Phew. Such a good video. Watching again.

cercatrova 4y ago
What a great video. We need more like these, direct founder perspectives with no bullshit. Any other examples you like?
egman_ekki 4y ago
Thanks for sharing, really curious to watch the video now. What I’m wondering before I do, though, is whether this isn’t that just an instance of survivorship bias? If there was another winner in the GPU space, you could be sharing video of someone else’s unique perspective, no? Related, there was a rather interesting episode in the Netflix documentary about gaming industry history (High Score, E4 This is War). The episode is about Sega console and how it succeeded over Nintendo and others. It shows the strategy of the Sega CEO and I’ve wondered since then if the strategy of the CEO was just his genius, luck of the market circumstances, or just survivorship bias.

snowypine 4y ago

Unique insight can also mean something that you deeply believe that isn't obvious on the surface. E.g. Doordash with their suburb strategy - I'm sure lots of other delivery companies heard about suburbs. None of them took it seriously enough to really invest heavily into suburbs. And, Doordash is now one of the top delivery companies.

nine_k 4y ago
Lower density means longer delivery trips and fewer orders delivered in one trip. It was (and still is) a higher-hanging fruit than delivery in dense cities, maybe requiring deeper pockets than, say, GrubHub / Seamless had.

rdli 4y ago

In my experience, the founder(s) are one of the few people who will be able to push and innovate as others start to copy you. I think PMF is a continuum and what is PMF for $1M ARR is highly unlikely to be sufficient to get you to $10M ARR which will require more evolution to get to $25M ARR.

cowpig 4y ago

> the market is too efficient for your 'unique insight' to really benefit you all that much beyond your Seed or Series A pitch It feels like the HN community combines a poor understanding of economics with a religious-like capitalist zeal into beliefs that, at least to my eyes, appear absurd or even farcical. Is everyone the same? Do they all have access to the same information at the same time? Do conditions never change in asymmetric ways?