My experience leading an older startup is that category two is hard to escape whether or not you’re working in person. It has more to do with the “Innovator’s D

My experience leading an older startup is that category two is hard to escape whether or not you’re working in person. It has more to do with the “Innovator’s Dilemma” - once a company has found product market fit and is generating profits, everything is fine-tuned for that purpose. The company’s reason for existing is to generate profits from that one thing that really worked out. Some companies are able to add great new products over time, but I sense that it’s more common for companies to have one great play, after which they either die or merge with another to enjoy better economies of scale. If you’re big enough and rich enough, you tend to burn a ton of money on internal research groups, but very little of what gets researched is ever a successful product. Doing this as a smaller organization is nearly impossible, which is why I think so many startups just exit rather than finding entirely new things to build.