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Comment by bentlegen | Hacker News Reader

What I think is great about this story, is that there's nothing particularly novel about Assistly. They entered a pretty crowded market and made better software. That's it. And they're $50 million richer for it*.

Too often we harp on people for building "another [insert existing software]", but there are more success stories here than you'd think.

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(Full disclosure, I'm competitively bias, but try to keeping balance) Is it really the case that it's the software that wins out, or the founding team behind it? While I certainly agree we do harp on about "another [insert existing software]", in this case look at the track record of the team behind the software - mostly all worked together before, mostly all sold before. Does the age old adage "It's not what you know, but who you know" come in to play here? It would be interesting to look at other similar success stories as this, where it's already a crowded market being penetrated, to see what the teams are behind each success.

Ex-salesforce here, in full agreement. Who you know has a big role to play in most acquisitions, but quite important for a corp culture as unique as salesforce. In all fairness, knowing the team & culture well (and seeing a close fit), helps mitigate the risk that the acquisition won't take.

That's why you should sometimes ignore the "someone is already doing that" crowd when pitching your ideas.

Learn what they are doing so you can learn from their mistakes.

There is something novel about Assistly: it's fucking awesome.

As someone who has tried every single support tool available on the web, Assistly blows everything else out of the water.

That's why they won.

The market is much, much bigger than $50M, so I wouldn't say they 'won'.

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