I'm really reminded of Peter Thiel's talk about competition is for losers when I read this list. Thiel makes the salient point that most of a companies value is

I'm really reminded of Peter Thiel's talk about competition is for losers when I read this list. Thiel makes the salient point that most of a companies value is generated 10-15 years after it's founding or even IPO. This basically means, a sureshot to startup success is a company that will survive and thrive even after 10-15 years. One deficiency is I never feel any of the YCombinator companies will survive and thrive after 10-15 years. To do so, you need a strong monopoly that is unassailable unless your competitor gets very lucky or has extremely deep pockets and competence. You need an edge, that makes it hard for competitors to compete. The prevailing wisdom is that this edge can be generated through network effects, and there is some truth to it but I feel even the posterboy example of Network Effects, i.e. Meta, is losing it's network effect. A real edge is generated by a product so superior to the competition, that the competition almost never catches up or gives up midway due to running out of money. Some of the largest tech companies have multiple such products and a culture of releasing such products. On the top of my head: 1. Microsoft Office has no real competitor (Google Suite came close but they gave up midway, LibreOffice is unpolished relatively). Surprisingly Microsoft released VSCode which also has no real competitor anymore (As a long term vim enthusiast, I switched to VSCode with VIM bindings). This is ignoring Windows which is not as big of a monopoly anymore but I reckon would endure another few decades. 2. Early Google released a suite of products that got no real competitors. Think Google Maps, Google Chrome, only recently have they been facing competition in these categories through companies with deeper pockets. Search is still firmly Google's monopoly (though these days I feel it's losing it's edge) 3. Amazon Customer Service is bar none. AWS is amazing, I still use it over Azure. Amazon recently though has not had any major products, I can think of that are dominant. 4. And of course, the king of building monopolies in products is Apple, IPhones, IPads, even Macbook Pros are a monopoly to a certain class of laptop users (hip working professional, non gamers). Everything Apple touches, it tries to monopolize from Airpods, to Safari to Maps and so. Consequently it is the worlds most valuable and profitable company. I've never started a business, this is a lot of armchair theorizing but the next set of enduring monopolies in my opinion are Nvidia (Customers keep asking but can't get a CUDA competitor), Tesla (Again Analysts keep talking competition, but Tesla's moat seems deeper than people realize), OpenAI, SpaceX (though it's market is likely smaller than Elon thinks), Boston Dynamics? (It's market may never get big enough). A few companies I think will lose their monopoly status is Meta, Netflix, Snapchat, TikTok, maybe Google.