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Entrepreneurship

374 posts

Your competitors don't matter

Your real competition isn’t your competitors, it’s the status quo. Visa’s biggest competition isn’t Amex, it’s cash. This was true with our kreplace situation as well. We were concerned that the Linux community would adopt their technology instead of ours. In the end, they adopted neither—they preserved the status quo.

Trajectory matters more than state

When considering how to grow your business, it’s not about where you are, it’s about where you’re going and how fast you’re getting there. Long-term thinking is hard for a very simple reason: every company is in a race against the clock. Whether you’re bootstrapped or bankrolled, that clock is always ticking. Creating a product company requires an upfront investment of time and money and gives you a limited window to either break even or show enough evidence of growth to secure funding. It’s hard to worry about future problems when you have a hardwired focus on hitting a short-term target. But think of it this way: which deserves more attention, a big wound that’s healing, or a tiny tumor that’s growing? It’s not about where it is, it’s about where it’s going.