How to win against startups with strong technical teams

3 points·hookiepookie··4 comments

I am thinking about building a startup in a cutting edge AI/B2B space but I am worried because some of the competition is led by very strong technical people. I would like to hear stories of startups that have won against other companies with stronger academic/technical pedigree and what factors led to them overcoming their competitions' strong academic leadership.

View on HN

Strong technical teams can get stuck solving the wrong problem, or building a more general/elegant solution than is truly necessary for the problem at hand. This is particularly likely to affect teams with a lot of folks from academia.

But if you don't have any particular edge in this space, why do you want to get into it? Why would customers buy from you rather than the other teams?

Sounds reasonable, but the question is whether building the elegant and user-oriented solution is really such a hard problem if you can do engineering very well. Any case studies or historical examples?

I see the problem as difficult in the same way that losing weight is difficult: we know how to do it, it's relatively straight forward, you just have to really want it and commit to it for extended periods of time.

I'm sure you can find plenty of startup materials that talk about how it's important to look for a problem and build a solution, rather than building a solution in search of a problem.

Marketing will save you

Reply on news.ycombinator.com