
What If Google Does It? - How To Think About And Crush Your Competition - jasonlbaptiste
http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/75314/13-Ways-To-Think-About-And-Crush-Your-Competition.aspx
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akg
There are several other reasons regarding why startups win:

* Startups usually have great hackers. Business is about people, and successful startups are started with or staffed with great developers who are exponentially more productive than the norm. PG explains this phenomena in his essay: <http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html>

* Startups also tend to be more focused, driven, agile, and create an environment conducive for productivity (no meetings, HR paperwork, etc.).

* Startups also target the low-end market. To quote PG again, "it's easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper...if you build the simple, inexpensive option, you'll not only find it easier to sell at first, but you'll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the market."

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dshah
One additional point: Just because a big company (like a Google or Facebook)
gets into your market, it doesn't mean they'll stay in it.

There's a fair amount of precedence that big companies jump into a particular
category (thereby causing loss of sleep for some startups) and subsequently
retracting. One example includes Facebook vs. Foursquare in the "check-in"
space. And, Google has officially killed off a number of projects recently.

One of the advantages that startups have is that they can remain focused on
the customer problem. They don't have 100 other business units to fall-back on
if one particular project doesn't work out.

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akg
Exactly right. A startup's project is their bread and butter making them all
the more inspired to do the best they can. Where as a Google can just write it
off if it doesn't work out; they also probably won't have their best people
working on a fringe/experimental project.

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tszming
This is what Mark Zuckerberg said during the Startup School 2011 and I think
it is so true.

"I don’t pretend that I had any idea that I was doing. I always felt like we
were so close to dying in the first years, and were afraid that Google was
about to build our product and we were going to be screwed, and look how long
it took for them to build our product,” he said laughing, referring to
Google’s newly launched social product Google+. “You are going to make a ton
of mistakes, you don’t get judged by that.”

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/30/facebooks-zuckerberg-if-
i-w...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/30/facebooks-zuckerberg-if-i-were-
starting-a-company-now-i-would-have-stayed-in-boston/)

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j_baker
...but whatever you do, don't talk about "crushing" your competition,
especially in public. This is a terrible idea from a legal perspective.

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schnaars
Do you have a precedent for this? Generally the lawyers are all about this.

