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Making Startups Powerful

• bob1029 24d ago
  > There's a variant of going full stack where you eat your way gradually through the customer by doing all their hardest work for them. One of my clients provisions front office applications for banks and the conversation has come up more than once regarding the client evolving into a bank themselves and building up operations around the capabilities of the product stack. One good multi-regional partner and it could be a radically different animal. Providing software to one very big customer tends to be a lot simpler than providing it to 20+ smaller customers.
  • tacostakohashi 24d ago
    [flagged]
    • collingreen 24d ago
      The arrogance of this comment detracts from the kernel of good, which is that banks are very complicated and lots of the complication is regulatory and finance, not just software.
    • tomhow 23d ago
      Please don't post such contemptuous comments on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • n4r9 24d ago
    In my experience it depends on the nature of that client. A drawback to having a dominant client is that they have a lot more leverage in roadmap, prioritisation, and product fit. That can seriously impact the internal coherence and maintainability of the product. Too many bits of business logic lodges in weird places because the client didn't want to write custom behaviours, and no time to tidy it up because they're always demanding their next wishlist feature to be deployed yesterday.
• ahgqw 24d ago
  Suggesting every dark pattern for startups and then using record labels as the boogeyman like it's 2000 again is ... odd. Why don't you let artists decide if they want record labels? They were far better off with EMI and Columbia records than with Spotify. It is better to give $500,000 of $1,000,000 to a record label than $3 of $10 to Spotify. And record labels were pretty damn good at selecting artists, even in pop music. Does Paul Graham think music got any better after 2010?.
  • CPLX 24d ago
    I'm shocked to read that Paul Graham is only 61. His writings lately sound more like late 70s in terms of age and worldview. References to record labels? How much do record labels have to do with people discovering and catching on to music artists in 2026? What does a multi-billion-dollar 17 year old tech conglomerate like Stripe have to do with startups at this point? I maintain that one of the hardest things for people to really internalize is when the group that they are in goes from being an insurgent to being the establishment. I can think of very few examples of people successfully adapting their worldview to that fundamental change in their identity. The next class of YC founders is no less a product of the financial/tech ruling elite than the next batch of Goldman Sachs summer interns.
    • Grombobulous 24d ago
      IIRC the record labels made a deal with Spotify to own a percentage of the company in exchange for a lower royalty rate. This is a mathematically diabolical way to shut artists out of profits. Sure, the record label also takes a lower percent of the pie, but they also own part of Spotify's pie. In the context of the post-AI economic environment where we are casually talking about our TVs wiretapping our homes even when they don't have Internet access, the whole article reads so gross. How to make your startups more powerful: 1. Get your customers signed up and locked in ASAP 2. Make your product its own little feudal kingdom with walls, moats, and gates 3. Maximize the amount you slurp up customer data in disgusting ways your customers can't even comprehend Steve Jobs was no saint but compare how he talked about products to how Paul G is talking about them, it's not even the same basic concept of business. For the former, it was about increasing profits by building the best product experience possible. People will spend more on a Mac or an iPod because it's better than the competition. Yes, there were plenty of forms of ecosystem and lock-in, but the way you locked customers in was by providing the best experience. In the case of the latter, it's all about flexing your leverage and holding power over your customers. You don't even hold basic respect your customers in the system that Paul and the rest of Silicon Valley champions these days. Capitalism is being replaced by Leveragism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FZy1lBNykA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FZy1lBNykA
• arionhardison 24d ago
  Given the impact some YC startups are having on society at large I think a better question than "How" is "Why". Do we really want Flock to become even more powerful? Even in the cases where the answer is "yes"; I believe that working backwards from the why could provide a more elegant path to accomplishing said goal.
• austin-cheney 24d ago
  > Another thing I'm always looking for is tails that could wag the dog. The history of startups is full of these. Paypal started out doing security for hand-held devices. They created Paypal as a demo of their security software. But then eBay sellers started using it to take payments, and after a couple months the founders acknowledged that this was the business they were now in, even though they hadn't meant to be. So whenever founders build something peripheral to the main product I always ask: could this be the real product? Reminds me of Slack. https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/30/the-slack-origin-story/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/30/the-slack-origin-story/ I never understood why anybody would pay for Slack when its based on IRC and IRC is free, but whatever. I guess when you are spending other people's money and all your employees are super insecure these kinds of things pay for themselves... maybe?
  • mjr00 24d ago
    > I never understood why anybody would pay for Slack when its based on IRC and IRC is free, but whatever. Comparing IRC vs Slack maybe made sense when Slack was very young, and it was like buying a Honda Civic vs a Ferrari, where one is obviously nicer but the other still accomplished the same thing with less frills. These days it's the choice between buying a Honda Civic vs a Boeing 747. They both get you from one place to another (communicating between employees) but that's where the similarities end now. Slack has way too many API integrations, historical search, features for everything from compliance message archiving to embedding images to dumb GIF searches that people seem to like. The fact that it has irc-like channels and chatting isn't really the point of the platform anymore. Yes you could code this all yourself using IRC bots, but at that point IRC is no longer free, it's costing you time. If you get to that point, Slack does it better and cheaper.
    • austin-cheney 24d ago
      I guess I can see it both ways. Most people who claim to be software developers have never written software. They likely write some JSX, type a few commands, and pat themselves on the back. For those of us who do write software an API integration is typically one HTTP request and I wouldn’t pay a subscription price per headcount for something that takes 10 minutes to build and test one time.
• youoy 24d ago
  I am not surprised that Silicon Valley researchers say they cannot solve the alignment problem... Here the leading voice in the region publishes an article about how to be more powerful without any other mention of alignment but "users". For example, I am sure facebook users (the ones buying ads) are super happy, but is the company aligned?
  • sigbottle 24d ago
    To a first approximation, everything is power. How do we prove alignment? Often times, large regulatory bodies. Who supports that? Does the regulatory body actually have enough power to enforce those standards? (Hint: look at modern America). That's an example of power questions sneaking in even when you didn't want to. Even "mere Darwinism" is less extreme because it pretends like there is some objective criterion called natural selection that will filter out bad candidates, when it's often the case that the bad candidates are the ones that weren't proactive to define the selection process themselves. Sitting back and optimizing for an externally imposed standard is worse than being able to impose said standard yourself. (If this point was complicated - my point is that yes, Darwinism makes sense, but when applying it, you can get a mis-skewed definition of what "natural selection" really entails. I am calling out that caveat). Of course, my hope is that that isn't the end all, be all solution. Philosophy doesn't end with Nietzche, hopefully. But the world does sure looks bleak right now...
    • popalchemist 24d ago
      Counterpoint: Love is not power. "Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." -Jung
      • mitxela 23d ago
        And yet we have the saying "all's fair in love and war." Adultery, experienced in xx% of relationships, is a blatant power struggle. It's normal to edit your dating app pictures (or was back when people actually used dating apps) to look more attractive, or to get cosmetic surgery. There's custody battles and all that.
• AIorNot 24d ago
  I’m glad there’s a lot of people commenting negatively below to PGs modus operandi (rationalizing maximum greed in seemingly thoughtful measured essays that make him seem like a kindly philosopher instead or digital robber barron) Like Ayn Rand, and PT Barnum before them VCs and Tech Bros will be looked at with great hostility in next years as having destroyed society with their brand of hyper-capitalism all in the name of “disruption”
  • rustystump 23d ago
    A part that rubs people wrong is that they have no choice and competition doesnt exist outside the vc ecosystem. VC can subsidize a non profitable model for a decade often with an ipo that isnt profitable for another decade of net zero value creation. It isnt capitalism. It is a pay to play game where if you are not in the club, you have little chance of playing let alone winning. The cherry on top is the culture of cheating, lying, stealing, and all kinds of other “disruptive” tactics is actively encouraged and cheered on. This is while claiming to be altruistic too. The public is growing a strong deep hatred of sv, whose only response seems to be calling everyone poor and laughing. It is sad, because I still think technology is a force for good.
  • tim333 23d ago
    I think he specifically speaks against maximum greed here? "create more value than you capture", "have the best product", "Being generous makes you more powerful" etc.
    • AIorNot 22d ago
      I think its a wolf in sheep's wording - PG is a master of reasonableness to amplfiy greed behind nice sounding words - note he always says “caring about value , caring about market, product etc” but not caring about people their lifestyle or human value or even established ethical companies - everything is a hammer in the nail of disruption Meanwhile he moves his family to England and Europe to take advantage of small town life, more govt protection less screen time for his kids etc The VC model is about funding supergrowth potential sustainably for PROFITS not society Its all about extracting every ounce of profitability in any situation not about caring for employees, customers etc with the expectation that trickle down disruption will benefit society We’ve had 20 years of this in the us -are we better off?
• themgt 24d ago
  For example, if you opt in, we'll tell you how you're doing compared to other users. The obvious AI variant is to let your users opt in to training your model on their interactions with it. Many will resist that, but if some don't, the model they get to use will outperform the vanilla one used by the others. The vanilla one? Is this the pg Malcolm Gladwell arc, where he's retelling some real concept but warped by misunderstanding to the point of incoherence? Who's getting hobbled running on "vanilla models", do we have examples?
  • mitxela 23d ago
    If it won't make the model worse when you opt out, then you have to find a way to make sure it makes the model worse, so they'll opt in. It's like how LG TVs make you consent to recording and uploading everything you say in the vicinity, or else you can't have voice commands, which they explain is because it would be illegal to analyze sound inputs for the voice commands without that consent. It's not true, of course, but it sounds true and it makes you want to consent.
• mirmor23 24d ago
  I read the article and kept wondering what the author is trying to convey. It reads like a checklist compiled into an essay with no wisdom nor rationale baked into it. mostly vague and generic -- like a human transform applied to an llm output.
  • well_ackshually 24d ago
    [flagged]
  • tim333 23d ago
    I guess a summary of what works?
• taylorfinley 24d ago
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• jchonphoenix 24d ago
  PG hasn't been in the bay for a long time so he doesn't understand what the ecosystem is like anymore. For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked stuff.
  • redanddead 24d ago
    What’s the solution
    • CalChris 24d ago
      Understanding the problem before attempting the solution is always a good idea.
      • CharlieDigital 24d ago
        I think this is a very classic "waterfall" world view. In many cases, the problem can only be understood through many failed solution attempts. It could be because the actual problem is novel. It could be because there is a different way of thinking about the problem that is not apparent studying only what a customer does today with the limitations of the software that they have right now. The point of "move fast, break things" is to address this fallacy that anyone can fully understand a problem before attempting the solution; it is often the case that in attempting a solution, one comes to understand the actual, valuable problem.
        • ctkhn 24d ago
          Waterfall means designing and building everything before rolling it out to users. Researching a problem before you start tackling it is just general good advice. You can be more effective while moving fast and breaking things while still taking some time to know where to move and what is ok vs not ok to break.
    • 24d ago
• franzcoughka 24d ago
  [flagged]
• armchairhacker 24d ago
  What are some recent powerful startups? The only ones I've seen are AI grifters (not even useful AI) and Polymarket/Kalshi, which makes me cynical; although I've seen some decent startups that are small (i.e. non-powerful) but nonetheless profitable.
  • brazukadev 24d ago
    Isn't Anthropic and OpenAI still startups? Even though they have big revenue, their business model isn't proved yet and there is a big chance they gonna fail and so most of the AI startups.
    • armchairhacker 23d ago
      OpenAI launched 10 years ago Anthropic launched only 5, but was built from connections to OpenAI
      • brazukadev 23d ago
        Launch date is not what defines a startup.
        • mosesk 22d ago
          How do you define a startup?
  • tim333 23d ago
    >Legora: Operates as an agentic operating system built for modern legal work seems to be doing well (https://x.com/paulg/status/2095997934584160647 https://x.com/paulg/status/2095997934584160647)?
• justonenote 24d ago
  We really need a change in mindset around what success means. Concentration of power, concentration of resources, concentration of market share are some measures of success. Out competing your rivals until you grind them into dust is some measure of success. This is the Peter Thiel and Bezos and to a large extent the ycombinator and PG philosophy of success. It's dressed up as "just innovation bro" whereas the truth is, innovation in a rapidly increasing technological society is certainly both broadly useful to everyone, but also, left unchecked, just a tool to be successful in ways that are, sometimes extremely, detrimental to society as a whole. "Disruption and Innovation" could go well past the lines that AirBnb and Uber crossed and achieve a lot more success. Just on PG as a persona, I was never a fan or non fan I've barely read his blogposts and only know of him incidentally from knowing this forum, but on the general area of "thought leaders" and the increasingly asymmetry one-to-many relationships we have been getting used to for decades I came across this very interesting and well put together video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU , give it 15 minutes if you do decide to watch it its a bit of a slow burn.
  • justonenote 24d ago
    I realize posting youtube videos that appear to be about 'creator beefs' at first glance may be considered low brow content for all the Jane Street or Palantir aspiring employees around here but such is life, you can lead a horse and all that. The world is made up of a bigger bubble than you are in but its still just a larger bubble with a lot of symmetries
  • epolanski 24d ago
    > We really need a change in mindset around what success means. How? Wealth and power is all that society obsesses about and there's an endless list of suckers for people that appear to be wealthy or powerful. Hell, even this board is filled with rat races spamming how to climb the pyramid in companies I vomit just thinking about "oh, this is how I got promoted to L17 from L16" or bs like that. Nobody's getting interviewed and hailed for saving the most lives in an Indian hospital or risking its life reporting in Gaza under constant Israeli bombs and shooting. But sure there's endless content of how this or that startupper created yet another unicorn with some pointless B2B saas. People want to hear and reflect and empathize with winners who have all, not with the "real" heroes impacting the world positively through sacrifice and pain.
• sublinear 24d ago
  > Since startups make the best stuff, they're strongest on level playing fields. They're weakest in markets dominated by companies you'd describe as mafia. Record labels are mafia. PBMs are mafia. In these worlds you don't win by having the best product. Indeed you may only even exist for as long as the mafia chooses to allow you to. Which is not to say they can't be defeated. They probably can be, but you'd have to do it by coming in from the side — by somehow making them irrelevant, rather than by frontal attack. Then you wouldn't depend on beating them to succeed; it would be an ancillary benefit of winning in another dimension. I think this is the strongest point being made here. It so accurately describes the situation in every category of software that it almost makes the rest of the post obsolete advice.
  • titanomachy 23d ago
    You’re saying there’s no level playing fields left?
• ossamameta1 24d ago
  [flagged]
• tumdum_ 24d ago
  > is there a way to make the money flow through it? It's always good when money flows through you. Ah, yes! The dream of being rent seeking middleman! The first thing that come to mind when I think “hacker” ;)
• deleted 24d ago
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• smashburger 24d ago
  Is open source still viable these days for a business model that relies on a single large customer and anyone else that also happens to need that solution?
• raincole 24d ago
  I wonder what the tipping point was where the general attitude towards PG and his essays changed. It's tempting to say AI, but I feel it was more like AirBnB era? When people saw how one of YC's golden goose affected the local communities, the rosy color on our glasses inevitably faded.
  • walt_grata 24d ago
    Once YC companies started having a negative impact on people and communities. Airbnb and gig worker stuff seems to be the start of it.
    • leoc 24d ago
      His reaction to the 2011 Dropbox password incident was an early concern, IIRC.
      • walt_grata 24d ago
        Very much so in my recollection
  • ViktorRay 24d ago
    Are you sure the attitude changed generally or did it change more specifically here on Hacker News? Perhaps the kinds of people who use Hacker News changed. https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38 https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38 Go to the 2:00 mark of this interview. Sam Altman says “Paul Graham is the most important force in startups of the past few decades” and the whole auditorium starts cheering. So Paul Graham is akin to a god in some places.
    • mzajc 24d ago
      I would hazard a guess that the people attending a YC event (!) to watch Sam Altman (!) talk with Garry Tan (!) would regard Paul Graham well irrespective of how the rest of the world sees him.
      • deleted 24d ago
• akk0 24d ago
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• thinair0x1rty6v 24d ago
  Sometimes communication from “powerful” people are often signals to others who are, or aspire to be, “powerful”. When you are signalling to the latter, you need to be cruder with your approach or the signal may be lost. There needs not be any wisdom in it.
  • thr0w 24d ago
    Agree with what you're saying, but what are you ultimately driving at?
• popalchemist 24d ago
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• alexashka 24d ago
  > But all these strategies for making startups more powerful have one thing in common — or more precisely, have to obey one constraint. They all have to make things better for the customer. Good thing we have venture capital to alleviate that constraint by enabling selling a dollar for 50 cents.
• elendilm 24d ago
  I would say, the author does have a point. Playing for the long game is good. But that sentence is too lossy to decipher the meaning unless you know what it means. Instead of making the company more powerful, I would recommend making the company more aligned with truth and the real world which has a nice side effect of being resilient. Add to that, preparing for scale. We have dedicated an entire year for nothing but architecture, correctness, distributedness and scaling. The economic perspective of the same would be reducing the cost of software development (not in the LLM massive code generation way but the opposite with architecture). Its been 5 years since we have been building Slyp and SlypBusiness along with the plethora of technologies around it. I don't know whether we are powerful as per the author's definition but we are damn resilient.
• fhub 24d ago
  The comments here are taking a very uncharitable definition of “power”. If I take that definition I can see how people are being so negative. But just a slightly more positive definition and this all seems like reasonable dialogue to have with an early stage startup.
• danvoell 24d ago
  I feel like the basis of this post is that in the current state of software development, SaaS alone holds very limited power.
  • Animats 24d ago
    if so, are Salesforce and Oracle in trouble yet?
    • danvoell 24d ago
      No, they are not in trouble yet. I'm not saying SaaS is dead. The article, to me, reads as, if you are in SaaS, you better be looking at ways to build power above and beyond a simple service, be it a network moat, corporate compliance, competing with the vertical....
    • shimman 24d ago
      Oracle has a BBB- credit rating (one step above junk bonds), so maybe yeah.
      • Animats 23d ago
        Did not know they'd slipped that far.
        • Animats 23d ago
          Incoming Oracle news: "Oracle’s Cold 6 AM Layoff Emails Hit Staff Amid New Wave of Cuts: ‘Today Is Your Last Working Day’ The company has not disclosed how many workers were affected by the latest cuts, which follow a reported 21,000-employee decline during fiscal 2026."[1] Uh oh. How long until the ORACLE sign comes off the big cylindrical building in San Mateo? Will Ellison have to sell his private island?[2] [1] https://www.techtimes.co.uk/oracle-new-layoffs-restructuring-costs-2-8-billion-1808676 https://www.techtimes.co.uk/oracle-new-layoffs-restructuring... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C4%81na%CA%BBi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C4%81na%CA%BBi
  • 23d ago
• dqh 24d ago
  > Being generous makes you more powerful. As Tim O'Reilly said, you should create more value than you capture. Many hard-headed business types would write this off as idealistic hippy stuff, but in fact this is the route to becoming really rich. > Hired CEOS take the power of the companies they run for granted, whereas founders remember the days when the company was so weak that it had to delight users to survive. I've always instinctively followed the generosity path, and have experienced that when customers are delighted and that when frictions are removed (or not added in the first place), good things will follow. However, I have not always been able to convince others to trust in and follow this path. Can anyone offer any advice or experiences on talking people out of trying to prematurely squeeze out every last penny?
  • vhiremath4 24d ago
    my advice? be the boss. before the pandemic hit and most of the world was quarantined, we decided to give loom away to students and teachers for free and made the service 50% off indefinitely. this was generous but also strategic. we made the simple deduction that, should people be locked inside, they would naturally see their sons/daughters using loom as students. or their spouse or roommates as teacher/staff.
  • arnorhs 24d ago
    This depends on what you are building and what your goals are. What pg is referring to is how to build transformative companies, unicorns if you will. There's plenty of businesses where you are simply optimizing a funnel, and driving more revenue at all costs is fully aligned with the goals of the company
    • dqh 24d ago
      I'm nearly always building early stage companies, where even the dev and operational overhead of charging for some added extra is not guaranteed to be paid for by the money collected.
  • howunfortunate 24d ago
    My sense is that it's context dependent. If you've got VC backing (or could soon) and are making deals in SF, the generosity path makes a lot of sense. Limited downside, infinite upside. You can afford generosity. If you're starting with $2000 and bootstrapping a textiles business out of Kolkata, it's a terrible idea, you're likely going to immediately get burned and never recover. (take with a grain of salt as I have no experience, just stating my observations)
• dools 24d ago
  How about "making investors less powerful"?
  • ignoramous 24d ago
    You should read the essay. It is mostly about pivoting towards an outsized outcomes for founders & leveraging various avenues available to their advantage.
    • dools 24d ago
      I don't mean less powerful relative to startup founders, I mean less powerful in terms of how we allocate resources in the economy.
      • epolanski 24d ago
        Why would that be a good idea? Greed has been clearly very efficient at allocating resources and money is the first resource of any business endeavour. Politics and courts should frames and boundaries around that greed's reach, otherwise just let it alone.
        • dools 24d ago
          Because when investors allocate resources based on the ability of those resources to generate a profitable return you end up with an increasing volume of resources being used in the service of fulfilling the needs of a decreasing number of people.
        • cowboylowrez 24d ago
          Greed has also been very inefficient at holding companies accountable in regards to external costs.
        • anonyme-honteux 23d ago
          What actually happens is that economic power don't stop at those boundaries but instead buy politics and courts
• Founderarcstone 24d ago
  Clerky is super useful for startups
• WheresPGsMind 24d ago
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• ElProlactin 24d ago
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  • jwilber 24d ago
    Yeah, Airbnb has been awful since 2022. Hotels always cheaper, easier, and better.
    • epolanski 24d ago
      Airbnb is insanely expensive and I have to do everything myself. The only reason to choose it is because it has some great venue that Booking is missing, but it's very rare.
      • shimman 24d ago
        The only time I ever used AirBnB the host cancelled on me 2 days before my trip while I was scrambling to find a replacement. Absolutely awful user experience that truly offers nothing to people in their moments of extreme need.
        • conductr 24d ago
          My mere fear of this happening keeps me away from the platform
    • paulddraper 24d ago
      Airbnb is so much more versatile I almost always start there when traveling. (And then move to booking.com.) A house for 6 people. A guaranteed view. A real kitchen. A remote location. Etc.
      • jwilber 19d ago
        You’re comparing traveling for 6 vs traveling for 1. I can’t imagine booking an airbnb for a work trip. I’ve booked play airbnbs for eg surf trips with friends. “Guaranteed view/kitchen/remote location” is laughably inaccurate. The last Airbnb I booked in NYC was literally a bed in a closet with bed bugs. I got my money back (should have received more for the inconvenience and dishonest listing, tbh). All this is ignoring the egregious cleaning fee they tack on after providing detailed cleaning instructions they make you do anyways.
• CM30 24d ago
  There is some really good advice here. Honestly, I think this might be one of the most important takeaways you can have as a startup founder/CEO in general: > It's exciting when you notice users "misusing" your product to do something you hadn't intended. This means there's something they want so desperately that they'll not only use any solution you offer, but even use things that aren't meant to be solutions. When you see something like that, don't be annoyed that your users are using your product wrong; listen for the message they're sending, because it could be valuable. A lot of very specialist businesses seem to fail this test, and lose out on the potential for a huge market because of it. Like it sounds ridiculous as hell, but I remember when GoAnimate had a huge audience among kids and teens looking to make silly videos for sites like YouTube. I also remember the company feeling uncomfortable that they were getting known for that online, and trying to refocus their product/service towards business users instead. Maybe they should have not done that, and realised that the periphery demographic was a potential customerbase that could have used a slightly different, perhaps more focused product with features relevant to their usecases. Similarly, I remember an example of a business creating software meant for designing signs for road and metro systems being surprised that toy train and simulation game enthusiasts were using the software for other uses. Again, feels like they should have treated this as a business opportunity, not a cause for confusion or concern. > Squeezing every last penny out of customers is a distraction. It gets you 2x returns at most. Whereas discovering some new thing you could make for them could easily get you 10x or 100x returns. They're two different ways of looking at the world, and the O'Reilly way makes more, for those who can do it. [5] This feels like a perfect condemnation of how a lot of private equity firms manage businesses. These sorts of tactics make them money sure, but a lot of the businesses they buy up would probably do better if they held off on the whole 'squeeze resources to breaking point' philosophy in favour of a much more customer focused one.
  • Scoundreller 23d ago
    I miss the pre-https-by-default days where I could see what search terms people used to land on my blog. Have excellent topic ideas for unmet needs.
  • Scoundreller 23d ago
    I miss the pre-https-by-default days where I could see what search terms people used to land on my blog. Gave excellent topic ideas for unmet needs.
• Kimmaughan 24d ago
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• black_13 24d ago
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• Ouman 23d ago
  Graham says the constraint is that becoming more powerful has to make things better for the customer, but several of the strategies he recommends are exactly how companies eventually acquire the ability to stop caring quite so much about customers
  • b345 23d ago
    Correct. If you're powerful, you already have several advantages over your competitors unrelated to customer/consumer success (like network effect, owning the path the money flows through etc.)
• carlsborg 23d ago
  This is one of those essays you print out and read every week because its that good. Just one of the operating insights like "being generous makes you more powerful" took me years to understand. I phrase it as "helping people win" instead.
  • kagevf 23d ago
    > "helping people win" That's a great way to put it!
• firemelt 23d ago
  its really refreshing to read its like paul old essay thanks for this grandpa paul
• deleted 23d ago
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