Comment by jhchen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhchen | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Novel does not mean no competition--there's always competition, even for breakthrough technologies. Even the telephone had to compete with telegraphs or snail mail. The novelty comes in the way an existing need is met. From your list, Uber competes against taxis to transport people short distances. Airbnb competes against hotels to provide short term housing to travelers. Dropbox competed against flash drive to transfer data between machines. These companies have a novel approach to enter and thrive in a competitive market.

A monopoly simply has to have significant influence on supply of a good. In the UK that can be as low as a 30% market share. Qualify a market enough and any company can be a monopoly (I'm sure there's some geography where Lyft or good ol taxis represent a monopoly), so it's important to determine the size and importance of a market (a monopoly over food in a small town is still problematic). So while I cannot say these companies are monopolies--we have the Department of Justice for that--many companies on your list would make a compelling case, were they to abuse their market power.

You make a fair point, and I also do appreciate the definition used by Sam in his post, which was (the site is now down) about network effects compounding the bigger you get, and creative a positive feedback loop. I buy that definition, sure, and I get your comment. However, what I take issue with is funneling tons of smart minds into a quest for green-field or blue-ocean opportunities. There are tons of huge opportunities in existing businesses. I guess I don't understand how we got from "disruption" to "find a business with no competition."

My thoughts on why is pure conjecture but I'll add that there are many such common misunderstandings. Chasing growth is another, which is why I'm very happy for this Startup Playbook. So many people do do not realize growth is STEP TWO AND YOU CANNOT SKIP STEP ONE:

"Your goal as a startup is to make something users love. If you do that, then you have to figure out how to get a lot more users. But this first part is critical—think about the really successful companies of today. They all started with a product that their early users loved so much they told other people about it. If you fail to do this, you will fail. If you deceive yourself and think your users love your product when they don’t, you will still fail.

The startup graveyard is littered with people who thought they could skip this step."

This is a small nitpick, but I'd say Dropbox competes against sysadmins setting up a corporate network share or FTP server (or even email attachments) for storing documents. They basically automated the sysadmin's job, with a slick interface that was easy to set up and easy to pay for.

Same with Slack. They took the concept of IRC, which many companies use internally, and made it dead simple to set up and use.

In essence, I'd say the competition arising these days is all about UX design. Startups are taking these existing services and making them easier and smoother to use.

Dropbox started out as a consumer company, not enterprise. When they launched, most of their customers were individual people not affiliated with a company.

>A monopoly simply has to have significant influence on supply of a good. In the UK that can be as low as a 30% market share.

A monopoly has economic control of the supply of a good or service, no competition and hence pricing power.

Having "significant market share" and zero pricing power in an intensely competitive market is not a monopoly, regardless of how SV has decided to co-opt the word.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com