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Comment by cannonpr | Hacker News Reader

What I would like to understand is why are these startups defensible.

The tech value proposition is in running these algorithms, often tensorflow at scale cheaply in production. Companies like Google/Facebook/Palantir often have access to very similar supposedly hard to get to datasets, plus a lot more engineering expertise to running these systems at scale.

Why can't they start playing whack-a-mole pumping out vertical products presenting a serious threat to these smaller startups. Maybe it's not worth it for them but there is a fair bit of cash there ?

For example Deepmind with healthcare, and the google jobs API ?

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The same reason small companies exist at all- they are more nimble and don't require to operate at large enough scale to survive.

IMO, it would be pretty mad to start a company today around general-purpose conversational AI or general purpose photo recognition service. Applying the same technologies for smaller, more specific groups of users is much less risky path.

I highly doubt Google/Baidu will get into business of recognizing manufacturing defects in fidget spinners or analyzing sensory data to predict when a punching press is about to fail.

> I highly doubt Google/Baidu will get into business of recognizing manufacturing defects in fidget spinners or analyzing sensory data

They will build platforms for:

- IoT - single robotic KIT/SDK, which allows you to easily install sensors and integrate data into rest of the platform

- Cloud ML - image recognition/models optimization - will allow to train model and detect defects from previous step by two mouse clicks

and take a lot of added value from small companies.

It's almost never the technology that makes a company, it's the market.

Only a small group of tech startups need to care about 'defebsibility'. If they didn't then patents would actually be useful in the software world.

The initial software built that addresses the problem is always easy to reproduce for nearly all tech startups. It's all of the supporting systems, marketing, lessons learned from putting it into production, etc, etc that make any company difficult to duplicate.

I wish building startups was only about the technology and defending it.

Big companies only have so much engineering available to them.

They're not quite as big as you think they are.

Also sometimes there's some serious... hinderances... for big companies to execute on certain ideas. Disagreements on how to execute or on what to execute, for example.

They may not have the domain expertise though.

I'm sure they could if they really wanted to get in that business, but there are only so many product managers and engineers to go around

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