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I don't really think this is a well thought out position. I suspect the author is succumbing to some combination of survivorship bias and not being introspectiv
by abetusk 3y ago
I don't really think this is a well thought out position. I suspect the author is succumbing to some combination of survivorship bias and not being introspective about their methods or conditions of when their methods are successful.
The article talks about these things in a roundabout way but doesn't seem to address the core issue. Yes, there's gold in the "no trespassing" hills, but any startup that does succeed in going that route is often blind to the legion of failed startups before it, in addition to being blind of what conditions have changed to then allow them to overtake the monopoly at the point in time they were successful.
The way to attack monopolies is often obliquely. One method is to serve a market that they don't want to serve because the margins aren't good and they prioritize short term rate of return. The monopoly isn't only not serving that market, they're often happy when they can outsource that part, removing the cost of their balance sheet to then focus on the higher end and higher rate of return products.
Eventually this is done for every service and the competitors eat the ladder from the bottom up, overtaking the monopoly on their high end services.
This is my interpretation of what Christensen is talking about in his "Where Does Growth Come From?" talks [0].
The other way is to serve an adjacent need, often creating their own market, and then overtaking the monopoly.
I would like to see a more introspective analysis of startups overtaking monopolies than a "move fast and break things" kind of article.
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg https://youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg