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Right, I have never believed that technology per se can be a competitive advantage. If a technically competent company (say Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) de
by paraschopra 15y ago
Right, I have never believed that technology per se can be a competitive advantage. If a technically competent company (say Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) decides to replicate your technology, they can. But the key question here is "if" they decide to. Many companies are usually so consumed by their own problems, that they seldom care about copying your new startup's technology.
But in any case, as a startup you need to have differentiators apart from technology. It can be your maniacal customer support, your ability to persuade bloggers to write about you, your ninja like SEO skills or even your geographical/vertical focus in market.
- tensor 15y agoGoogle is a perfect example of technology being a competitive advantage. The PageRank algorithm is both simple and elegant in its domain, yet the numerical methods to compute it efficiently are much more complicated than your typical social startup's. They had a patent on the technique from day one and the competition took years to catch up. You can similarly point to the big database companies. Building a good acid compliant SQL database is hard and the big database companies had the market cornered for a very long time. More recently, we have companies like Palantir which provide very sophisticated algorithms to their clients. Some algorithms are not just complicated from a software point of view, but you also need to understand the math to replicate them. It's not possible to reproduce them over the weekend even for an expert the domain. The other things you listed are also very important, of course. But technology itself can certainly be a very competitive advantage. You simply don't see that many examples of it because this sort of technology is hard.