
“Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted” - aboutruby
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1109220781035307009
======
dazbradbury
Funny - I have an email from pg from 2011 where YC didn't fund OpenRent [1]
due to our competitors being too dominant.

As head strong (and certainly naiive) young founders at the time, we continued
with our vision anyway. Thankfully we have gone on to become by far the
largest rental agency in the uk, and have driven real change (see tenant fees
ban) in the industry.

I mention this as when it comes to investment decisions, competitors /
incumbents of course _do_ matter. But as per what I think pg means here, when
running your own business any time spent thinking about the next startup to
raise a bucket load of cash is of course wasted. That has certainly been the
case in our industry where this seems to happen on a monthly basis.

[1] - [https://www.openrent.co.uk](https://www.openrent.co.uk)

~~~
LukeWalsh
I used OpenRent to find my last flat in London. It was great!

~~~
dazbradbury
Very happy to hear it!

------
aboutruby
Full text is:

> At both Viaweb and YC, every minute I spent thinking about competitors was,
> in retrospect, a minute wasted.

Follow-up tweet:

> It may be useful for some companies to think about competitors. That's why I
> didn't phrase it as a general rule. In particular it may be useful for more
> established companies to. If a startup has to, though, they're probably
> doomed.

Also a quote from Jeff Bezos:

> “If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different, it’s this:
> We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented, and
> we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are
> focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on
> things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work
> in two or three years, they will move on to something else. And they prefer
> to be close followers rather than inventors, because it’s safer. So if you
> want to capture the truth about Amazon, that is why we are different. Very
> few companies have all of those three elements.”

As a side note, I added […] in the title to show this isn't the complete text
but it got scrubbed then removed.

~~~
xfitm3
Do you think Jeff’s statement holds true today? I’m under the impression
Amazon is less customer centric but maybe I am biased.

~~~
ajkjk
From three recent years working there, absolutely. They bend over backwards
for their customers, always. The problem, and where most of the bad reputation
comes from, is from people who aren't their customers -- warehouse employees,
if you're trying to get things shipped to retail customers, or the actual
employees, if you're trying to do anything. And, probably, their over-
obsession with customers is why they've been so slow and incompetent about
dealing with sellers cheating their system -- because the default was letting
them get away with everything.

~~~
rocqua
How does 'giving your customers fake goods' not hurt customer service? It
seems like a customer first approach should be tougher on this.

~~~
ajkjk
It does, and I think the problem is more that Amazon's internal processes and
tribal knowledge are a bit clueless when it comes to fraud. Their perspective,
historically, has been to allow as many products as possible on the site,
because one of the way they get and retain customers is by 'having
everything'. Their metrics don't incentivize large purges. I think it's a bit
of an arms race between fraudulent sellers and the retail org's processes and
engineering, and unfortunately the latter iterates much slower so they can't
keep up.

Also, the warehouse processes at least are heavily designed around catching
mistakes like mislabeling, but less so intentional fraud like fakes (or - they
were a few years ago, imo). And they tend to treat fraud like a big data
problem ('what can we do to lower this statistic') instead of case-by-case:
'we need to get rid of every fraudulent seller'. Which, like, if you try
really hard to move a needle from, say, 80% to 95%, that ultimately means you
are vocally okay with 5%, which is stupid.

------
lbacaj
Totally agree with PG on this.

This isn’t the first time he says this obviously and has put a lot of thought
into this. The quote I really like from him on this topic is:

“A startup worrying about competitors is like a fat guy smoking a cigarette as
he worries about contracting West Nile Virus.”

I like to remind my two friends helping me build our side project right now of
this reality all the time. There are so many things that could kill us at this
stage, a competitor is the least likely.

~~~
sitkack
This makes me think of the relationship between gestation time and maximum age
of the organism and the number of offspring. Maybe the next VC craze will be
handing groups of 20 year olds 10k$ and some advice.

~~~
chii
> groups of 20 year olds 10k$ and some advice.

not that bad of an idea imho.

a VC fund with 100mil can fund 10,000 groups of kids this way. Gives kids new
opportunities socially (reduces teen delinquency), and the VC could hope to
recoup if/when one of them becomes unicorn status.

~~~
katzgrau
That's a horrible idea.

Whoever is in charge of this fund is responsible for dolling out 100mm of
other people's money.

How in the world does this group of investors responsibly filter and vet
10,000 suitable companies in a time effective manner? How do you effectively
keep track of the founders and the money?

Are checks being written to 20 year olds without much scrutiny in the hope
that a unicorn shows up without any real statistical basis for expecting such
an event? I'd steer clear of that fund.

~~~
Sileni
Eh, call it a non-profit or charity. Give the kids who show promise in tech a
chance to just start running instead of taking the typical college route. I
doubt it'd be on the scale of 10k companies, but a thousand a year? That could
be doable. Have the contracts be very generous towards the "students", and try
to make up the difference with donations and alumni contributions. It'd
essentially become a new form of secondary education, a trade school for tech
in a sense.

------
evangow
You have no idea how relevant this is to me at exactly this moment! About an
hour ago, I found out that a competitor (a larger incumbent player) released a
feature today that I had built and released 6 months ago!

I've been panicking the last couple of hours, but now it's back to the grind.
I've got a lot more feature ideas in mind, and this is just that extra push to
do the things I've been putting off.

~~~
shalmanese
If both you and a competitor could build a feature, then it was a feature that
was going to be built anyway. The art is to position and brand yourself in a
way that allows you to build unique features that wouldn't be useful to a
competitor because you are attacking different market segments.

If you can't position, then you become a commodity and you're competing purely
on price.

~~~
ehnto
Anyone can build a feature you can. Some market segments have existing players
and people shouldn't be afraid to play competitively. You don't live in a
bubble and you can innovate all day but your customers are still the same
people with the same needs. Either you are solving them, in which case someone
else will too. Or you are trying to sell them your toy project and convince
them they have a problem that it solves. SV has burned through billions on
projects that were hyper niche or had no market at all.

You can make a moat around your product, but that is different. You still have
a core value proposition that solves their real world problem and there will
be other people solving it too.

Most companies build moats through contractual lock in, trust and size, or
simply buying their competitors. I have yet to see a feature only moat.

~~~
fmihaila
> I have yet to see a feature only moat.

Features that induce a significant network effect can potentially lead to a
moat. No contracts necessary.

(Maybe this is what you meant when you mentioned "size" as a moat-building
mechanism.)

~~~
ehnto
Yep, that was the intent behind mentioning size. Google could be said to have
a network effect based moat around Google Docs for example.

------
MIKarlsen
I call bullshit. If he thought about competitors, it obviously affected his
actions. So how can he know, he would be where he is today, if he hadn't
thought about competitors? This is just another Silicon Valley bullshit
statement...

~~~
gist
Yep and there are always versions of what I will call the 'deathbed' story. It
usually is spoken by a person who has made it spending time on their deathbed
saying they didn't have to work as hard as they did.

Not only that but what is exactly the definition of 'worry'? It means
different things to different people and maybe what he did was obsessive
compared to what someone else did or would do in the same exact situation.

Look I am obsessive with computer backups as much as I can. Luckily I haven't
really needed them. Wouldn't it be really stupid for me to say years from now
'boy I wish I hadn't spent so much time worrying about backing up my
systems?'. (Of course not and that's obvious).

------
wayoverthecloud
Man but it's so hard to stop thinking. People said to build an MVP. I did.
Comparing it with competitors, it looks empty. It gets the job done but what
about other 107 integrations with third-party APIs my competitors provide?
Even if I show it to my potential customers, it feels like cheating. I feel
like if they know about my competitors they're bound to leave my software for
sure. This sucks, even more, when you are a solo developer. If I start chasing
every feature competitors have it's gonna take me a decade to build. Man but
I've put so much work already I don't want to give up too. It's a tiring
mental dilemma.

~~~
NicoJuicy
I've build Tagly/Handlr as a knowledge base for a company ( MVP as they say -
[http://handlr.sapico.me](http://handlr.sapico.me) ), they went for
SharePoint. After 2 years it's back on the table. And I've been dogfooding it
ever since.

The only thing is performance. But for it's porpose, it's perfect.

A lot of things have more features, but I've build it as a managable HN with
hierarchical tags. Which is kinda unique.

~~~
anotheryou
I super interested in Knowledgbases and "hierarchical tags" are close to a few
concepts of mine, too.

I think handlr could use a tagline and an elevator pitch somewhere. From the
looks I thought it might be a more general HN clone and even after a few
clicks it doesn't really reveal to me what it actually does.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Because now it's only used as a feed reader.

Tags can contain actions and fields ( eg. Email). Which makes it extensible.

But it's not setup that way, I want stories in it and improved performance
before I would ever pitch it

------
nicodjimenez
That's coming from a guy whose startup Viaweb was essentially made completely
irrelevant by a competitor (Amazon) with a better strategy. Does anyone really
buy things on Yahoo stores anymore?

If you want to grow fast and sell out, then you probably don't need to worry
about competitors, but if you want to stay in business for a long time, you do
need to worry about having sustainable competitive advantages.

~~~
mattmanser
It's one of the pieces of advice you get, have a plan how to exit. He exited
way before then, what Yahoo did is down to them.

------
tnolet
Or, in other news: “millionaire cherry picks anecdotes from his past to make
him look like a visionary”.

------
remote_phone
Sounds more like survivorship bias than actual good advice.

~~~
robryan
It only makes sense if you are selling a unique product. Even then though in
most online niches are you going to have similar products that people are
considering. For example this Drip comparisons page is a waste of time to
create according to the above advice:
[https://www.drip.com/comparisons](https://www.drip.com/comparisons)

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
That’s just content marketing, nothing to do with thinking about competition,
although that’s what you’ll be doing if you write that.

------
Dumblydorr
In the US Civil War, general Sherman was brilliant at logistics and military
science and had one of the most prescient views of the wars length and
brutality at its outset. And yet, US Grant was made the overall field
commander by Lincoln. Of Grant, Sherman argued he himself was better at
generaling than Grant in almost every way except this:

Grant doesn't give a damn what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares
me like hell.

~~~
arcturus17
Can't say I understand any of this. So Sherman thought that Grant's lack of
preocupation for enemy' action out of sight was a virtue? Why?

~~~
ghiculescu
He didn’t worry about things he couldn’t control.

------
keiferski
This advice is presented for startups, but it’s pretty relevant for life in
general too. E.g. dating, career success, physical fitness, achievement. Focus
on delivering your unique value to the world, not on beating the other guy.

------
martingoodson
'One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets
imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets
make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet
welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different
from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which
has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time,
or alien in language, or diverse in interest. ' T.S. Eliot in The Sacred Wood.

~~~
anotheryou
I'd go even further and say there is no novel thinking, only unique
recombination, randomness and reaction.

~~~
douglaswlance
If you think about how neurons work, they only make new connections, they
don't spontaneously create something out of nothing.

------
m0zg
Ain't nothin' wrong with a healthy dose of competitive research. At the very
least you need to know where you stand. Just be aware that your competitors
are about as clueless about things as you are, and they too don't know wtf
they're doing. But do by all means collect nuggets of wisdom as long as you
aren't spending too much time doing it.

Also, if you take these pearls of wisdom fro village elders seriously,
remember, there's a selection bias at play.

------
rbreve
And then at every vc/incubator they ask you, why are you better than your
competitors?

~~~
notahacker
This.

Worrying about your competitors redesigning their shopping cart or reducing
their price by 99 cents per month might well be wasted time, unless you happen
to find their design particularly admirable or compete in a very price
sensitive industry. But not even considering what people might use instead of
your service (even if this "competitor" is actually "do it in Excel") and
whether there are things you can learn from that would be a bigger mistake.

------
rpm33
Met my co-founder arbitrarily and had to end the relationship because of this
very reason - he would spend the entire day looking at competition and
freaking out about it. Was a bad sign!

------
dijit
I hate to be a dissenting voice here. And I agree that “worrying” is a
problem, but you should absolutely be looking at your contemporaries.

My studio recently released a product that seems to be being praised for the
fact we did not construct it in a vacuum and learned from the misgivings of
our own product and other products in the same genre.

------
rvn1045
A lot of what you need to do in your startup is actually just obbvious.
Spending time thinking about competitors or other things that are out of your
control is a waste of time. When asked how the amazon business will be
different 10 years from now, Bezos often says the same thing - that 10 years
from now customers arent going to wake up one day and say i want amazon to
deliver slower, i want less selection from amazon or i want higher prices. so
just focusing on those three things and not worrying about what your
competitors do or dont do would put you much farther ahead. youve just gotta
figure out what those three or four things are for your business - the core
stuff that customers really want and just keep focusing on making those things
better.

------
flexie
Why is the creator of HN not on HN anymore? Or is he? Has he entirely moved to
Twitter or is he still posting and commenting on HN?

~~~
mikemotherwell
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg)

~~~
flexie
Thanks. So he hasn’t posted at all for 5 years or commented at all for 3.5
years :-)

------
thetechlead
bs. it's like telling a PhD candidate no need doing reference research. being
a good startup is not only about solving customers problem well, but solving
in the best way and preferably first to solve.

------
gerdesj
What _exactly_ were you thinking about when "thinking" about your competitors?

~~~
tedmiston
Usually it's copying features "they have Foo, I just need Foo or Foo++". Worse
is: competitor A has feature X, competitor B has feature Y, competitor C has
feature Z... all I have to do is build X, Y, and Z in one! Unfortunately a lot
of product people think this way. I think it's generally a mistake.

~~~
Gibbon1
It's hard to make successful products by duplicatiing your competitors old
products. Consider that your competitors products likely have a lot of legacy
limitations that a green field design doesn't. And usually have features that
no one actually needs either.

Blatant example. The scope on my bench has a floppy drive. You know for saving
traces. Yeah like anyone wants or needs that today.

------
mholt
I get what he means, but... it's probably easier to say that "in retrospect"
when your ventures are as successful as his.

------
NicoJuicy
Jean Marie Dedecker, Belgian politician now, formerly Olympic judo coach, made
his team combat internally.

They won a lot of prices, but that's because the global championships were
"just a practice" for being the best internally. Not bothering others, not
settling for a second place. Ever

------
kvark
Yeah, but what about thinking strategically, placing figures on a virtual
chess board, anticipating moves, etc? Assuming their actions can affect you,
or otherwise them wouldn't be competitors. If this is a wasted effort to
someone, maybe they just aren't doing this right.

------
kissgyorgy
One of the best talks about this exact same topic is "The infinite players are
the ones that frustrate their competitors."
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5nAaxIkmFE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5nAaxIkmFE)

~~~
mseidl
I liked his talks.

------
drum
Cool dialogue between PG and Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow cofounder) on the
tweet thread - From Jeff: “You can always borrow concepts and ideas from other
startups, too. It's good to look, and understand the competitive landscape in
detail, but not to obsess over.“

------
samfisher83
Andy Grove and bill gates probably have a different opinion. Everyone has a
different opinion.

------
keyle
Side jab... hasn't posted on HN since 2015 but regular on Twitter? What gives?

~~~
GuiA
One cements your spot as a “thought leader” (blue verified check, very visible
follower/retweet/like count, routinely used as a source by the media), the
other not at all.

~~~
mrosett
I think PG has a solid enough "personal brand" that he doesn't need to build
it through being a twitterati "thought leader."

~~~
username223
PG is stuck in the awkward no-mans-land between having f-you money and
starting a rocket company. He achieved the first long ago, and will never
achieve the second, so being a Twitter guru is a reasonable compromise.

~~~
2arrs2ells
From what I know about pg and Jessica, they would have no interest in starting
a rocket company - even if they had infinite resources.

Figuring out how to get the smartest people in the world working on important
problems (like rocket companies!) is way more their style. And they’re having
incredible influence on that even in “retirement.”

------
inovica
Definitely in many contexts this is appropriate.Elsewhere in this discussion
someone mentions Amazon, who is famously customer 'obsessed'. However Amazon
do watch their competitors closely also - AWS changes based on competitors and
indeed the price of products on Amazon changes based on competitor prices. I
personally think you should not worry and obsess over your competitors and
definitely should focus on your customers, however ensuring you are not
blindsided by a change that a competitor makes is really important.

------
Insanity
Being aware of what competitors are doing is a good thing I think.

~~~
xenospn
Aware? yes. Thinking about it for more than 5 minutes? probably not.

------
usgroup
I’m not sure what spirit this is written in but as the author notes it
absolutely doesn’t generalise. Actually it generalises less and less the
smaller your company and the more critical your focus and USP is to survival.

------
willart4food
Quite interesting quotes and even more interesting comments.

My take is that entrepreneurs need to be obsessed with their Market(s) and
Domain expertise; which includes also the other players (competition) but not
just competition per se.

------
mythz
Agree with PG.

I mean I'd love to have the free time to be able sit analyze and strategize
against what my competitors are doing, but I'm too busy working on the next
place which I believe will add the most value. In the end you'll end up with a
different priority/feature-set and USPs that focusing and trying to replicate
what your competitors are doing.

IMO the most important thing is to have a solid Customer base, they'll submit
an infinite stream of issues/feature requests which will highlight where to
focus your efforts on. Although it's also important to have confidence in
innovating yourself as my best USPs have come from novel features that no-one
has thought to ask for, as you'll pretty much only receive requests for
features others have already done.

~~~
petra
Yes both users ideas and self generated USP's are important.

But since mostly everything can be copied, doesn't it make sense to build a
defensible strategy , building things your competitors will find hard to copy
?

And doesn't looking at competitors helps with that?

~~~
anongraddebt
This.

No one should take PG's quip to be anything more than advice for those who are
running a dysfunctional ship due to excessive obsession with competitors.

There are likely two broad ways any business gets off the ground:

(1) Unintentionally (2) Intentionally

Google was likely unintentional (Brin and Page weren't attempting to create a
business for their dissertation).

Amazon was quite clearly intentional.

Most startups are likely in (2).

VC-backed startups and startups hoping to obtain VC funding have a goal of
gaining some amount of strong traction (thus increasing the likelihood of fast
and significant growth).

If you're intentional, and you have a goal of obtaining the traction that's
attractive in the VC universe, then competitive strategy is not something you
can ignore. It's not something you myopically focus on, but it will help guide
your positioning and development (among other things).

------
tyingq
Almost every link to Twitter posted here, when I click on it from an
Android...gives me a "you're rate limited" page. Odd.

------
anotheryou
don't you re-invent the wheel a lot if you don't look it other solutions?
Especially for things not in your core domain.

~~~
anonytrary
On the flipside, look too much at other solutions and your wheel starts
looking like theirs.

~~~
anotheryou
Coming from art I'd say: don't be afraid of stealing a little. What matters in
the end is your stroke, polish and focus on it.

Often good solutions even agree. I had it more than once that I build
something and than found someone who had build a super similar solution.

I think the fine line for me would be: Don't be obsessed about details and
movements of your competitors, don't assume everything they do is good. But
check them out for some inspiration.

Actually especially those things you can copy from companies that are not even
competitors (other core domain), you really should copy. E.g. check out nice
empty-states or registration flows to jump start your first implementation
(and than iterate for yourself).

------
eruci
I don't really think much about my competitors, although I must admit I
flatter myself thinking they think about me.

------
alexheikel
This kind of recommendations are so simple but they have a really deep and
truly meanings.

~~~
muzani
He goes into it in more detail, point 4 here:
[http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html](http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html)

------
tibet1998
I have the same feeling. Thinking about competitors eats more than social
networks.

------
seizethecheese
YC explicitly moved from Boston to SV to pre-empt competition.

~~~
Alex3917
I mean presumably if someone has done a similar startup before you, you should
be expected to know about what they did and understand why it worked or didn't
work, and you should have some theory about what you're doing differently or
what has changed in the world to make your startup viable now. And presumably
you should treat your current competitors similarly.

When pg is saying that thinking about competition is a waste of time, he's not
saying you should ignore the competition, only that you shouldn't sit there
stressing out about it rather than working on your own startup.

------
ronilan
If he hadn’t spent the thinking time, he wouldn’t have come to this
realization. By wasting time, he gained experience. It was thus not wasted.

Gaining experience is inherently an inefficient process. It’s the nature of
the beast. (And it’s tweetable).

~~~
turdnagel
True, but you can sometimes make up for that inefficiency with learned wisdom
- other people's experiences. (Sometimes that comes in the form of tweets.)

~~~
nikki93
Actually the only experience you can experience is your own, IMO. Reading a
tweet is you having an experience involving someone saying something and you
interpreting that and maybe imagining what they experienced, but it's
different from actually experiencing what they had experienced from their
perspective. The cost of experiencing from your perspective is still the same
amount of attention, and the "innefficiency" is in not being able to
experience more with the same amount of attention, it seems like; but on that;
I don't think there is inneficiency or any making up for it, it's just about
choosing which kinds of experiences to have (they still happen at the same
rate of attention conversion).

------
throes_death
Every minute I spent thinking about insightful quotes from modern day gurus
was a minute wasted

------
Animats
One word: Blackberry.

~~~
goatherders
I dont understand your point. I THINK you are suggesting that BlackBerry (RIM)
would have been well served paying attention to competitors, particularly
Apple. But that is what ultimately sent RIM on a downward spiral: focusing on
competitors instead of customers. If they had focused on being the premier
business oriented device things might have turned out different.

~~~
sah2ed
There are multiple factors at play, but focusing on only one factor can lead
anyone to draw the wrong conclusions as you and the gp have done.

The gp mentioned RIM as a clear example of a company that did not focus on its
competitor (Apple) and paid dearly for such a mistake, but that’s an
incomplete reading of history.

First of all, Apple was only one of several competitors including Nokia,
Samsung, SonyEricsson etc to RIM.

The iPhone introduced by Apple heralded a new class of mobile phones that are
considered smartphones that were:

1\. touch-based;

2\. had larger screen real-estate;

3\. fully Internet-capable (compared to pared-down Internet protocols like
WAP, i-mode etc).

After the iPhone was launched, Google entered the ring with Android. The head
of Android (who is ex-Apple) has publicly admitted to scrapping their v1.0
after he saw just how good the iPhone was. IOW, Android copied several
concepts from Apple because the iPhone demonstrated _what a smartphone should
be capable of_.

This imitation step is important as it marked an important shift in the
smartphone market — the Overton window for smartphones capabilities had moved:
will people continue to buy screen-constrained and Internet-constrained
devices that feature a physical (high tactile feedback) keyboard OR screen-
and Internet- _un_ constrained devices with a virtual (low tactile feedback)
keyboard?

RIM bet the house on the former while the market was slowly but steadily
moving to the latter. Of course betting against what customers were demanding
is why BB lost against Android & iOS, not that RIM failed to imitate Apple to
the letter.

~~~
goatherders
I disagree. The last few years of BB included touch screen devices including
some with touch keyboards. My view is that had BB leaned into the enterprise
security solution that made the devices popular with businesses in the first
place their story might have turned out different.

~~~
sah2ed
> _The last few years of BB included touch screen devices including some with
> touch keyboards. My view is that had BB leaned into the enterprise security
> solution that made the devices popular with businesses in the first place
> their story might have turned out different._

Essentially, you are saying RIM should have focused their differentiation
efforts on _remaining_ the market leader in enterprise security solutions for
mobile devices, right?

My argument, which you seem to have missed is that: the market’s perception of
what constitutes a mobile device and the ecosystem surrounding mobile devices
had been permanently altered by iOS and Android, but RIM did not fully realize
this until it was too late.

The change in perception created knock-on effects in adjacent markets like in
the mobile device management (MDM) industry. Whenever there is a change in
perception, the behavior of market participants will change across the board,
and this is particularly observable in buyer preferences.

As you say, BB was a leading vendor of enterprise security solutions in the
MDM market with BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), so what changed?

RIM value proposition was that, to get maximum value out of a BES investment,
your enterprise needed to standardize ALL employees whose job descriptions
mandate access to email on-the-go on BB devices. Oftentimes this meant an
enterprise would pay for a BES license, MS Exchange + MS ActiveSync license on
top of the costs of procuring BB devices for ALL employees that need mobile
email.

With the benefit of hindsight, can you see what was wrong with RIM’s business
model?

1\. High switching costs. The combination of BES + BB devices translates into
vendor lock-in. You cannot use BES without a fleet of BB devices. You cannot
permit use of BB devices in your enterprise without _first_ purchasing a BES
license. You needed to make a two-prong investment to receive value in return
from RIM’s offerings at that time.

2\. High operational costs. RIM was the only supplier you could buy from as
long as you are invested in the BB _ecosystem_. IOW, pricing was not
competitive—you wouldn’t have much leverage when RIM unilaterally decides to
raise prices.

The steady rise of a trend — Bring your own device or BYOD [0] —meant that
lots of current RIM customers could now lower their costs by allowing
employees to buy a mobile device of their choice and at their own cost (which
solves problem #1) and; they could avoid the problem of vendor lock-in by
evaluating lower-priced MDM vendors that support multiple mobile OSes instead
of just BB OS (which solves problem #2).

An additional benefit of the BYOD trend is that the lower costs afforded
smaller companies the same benefits of MDM that had been beyond their reach
due to RIM’s enterprise-focused pricing, while they were the dominant vendor.

As I said earlier, there are multiple forces at play. Not only did RIM
introduce touch screens, they also embraced Android as an OS on their devices,
but did it change anything? Absolutely not.

0: _BYOD refers to the policy of permitting employees to bring personally
owned devices to their workplace, and to use those devices to access
privileged company information and applications._ From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_your_own_device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_your_own_device)

------
agnelvishal
"Love your enemies". There is no enemy and no competitor.

------
Tistel
I am fairly mentally exhausted at the moment. When I first read the message,
and noted the author, I thought it said: "every minute I spent thinking about
_computers_ was a minute wasted." I was like, wow, that's a big change in
course. Is he going to become a monk or something? Lol. time to turn off the
computer.

~~~
nyrulez
I do wish he made that tweet and then it would be hilarious to see everyone
inject truth into that statement and rationalize it from all possible angles.

"That's why YC is now more focused on biotech and food businesses. Computers
are no longer the fastest growing market and YC is smart to adapt so quickly
while other VCs are still playing catch-up"

