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I think we are definitely in a new era.

My view: entrepreneurs should take on a little more technology risk. Not just market risk. License IP from federal labs and government agencies -- there is SO much advanced tech sitting on shelves. Do government contracting to fund R&D.

Go beyond just software, especially the SaaS kind, because ultimately, software can only make so much difference in society. Investors don't like government and anything sciencey, especially when there's a hardware component, so I don't believe most hotshot founders will go for it. But hopefully enough will take on more technology risk.

The biggest problems out there right now require a mix of traditional software, ML, hardware and research. All put together in the right way.

Can you give any example of such “advanced technology”?

For example, there is significant IP around additive manufacturing beyond plastics that are sitting as a squatting duck with national labs and universities that can be leveraged

Consider all these:

https://technology.nasa.gov/patents

And the NSF's equivalent, the many national labs, defense labs, and research-intensive universities (eg UC Irvine is keen to for entrepreneurs to pick up IP; as are lots of others). There's so much out there, and it's just waiting for entrepreneurs to commercialize it. Many things won't have direct commercial application, but much of it does. Typically the entity doing the licensing doesn't just give you the IP, but a full teaching program and network to help you get further.

You are describing a moat, and it is indeed important. I’ll step up on the soapbox for a moment…

A moat can be unique technology, an exclusive licensing agreement, an exclusive IP (patent or otherwise), very unique experience or insight, an exclusive geographic location, a very unique business model, a very unique skill and/or reputation, etc.

Follow the leader seems like a plan, but it’s probably not a good plan unless you have tons of money to spend on marketing and sales.

In my previous home city, someone opened a bake shop with coffee that was targeted at the growing Korean population. It was unique: Korean pastries, Korean friendly faces, great coffee, etc. They probably invested $100k in opening this shop. It became very popular. Then, in about nine months, five more copycat shops opened up within a mile or two of this store. Result: business went way down for all of them. They all lost revenue, and they all invested a lot of money.

Software is prone to this kind of copycat behavior. The thinking goes like one of these two sequences:

1. People like software—>I write software—->People like [note apps, for example]—>I can write a note app in a week—->I’ll start a SaaS business

2. I write software—->I think [fill in the blank] is cool—>I will write an app for [that] in a week—->I’ll start a SaaS business

Writing software is not a differentiator. It’s not a shortcut to big bucks. It’s not a solution in itself. It’s just a tool. Anything you can write in a week (or 3 months) can be done by 100,000 other people—-in a week (or 3 months).

You have to start with a problem, defined by a large group of people, that you have the experience and expertise to solve in a unique and valuable way. Software may be part of that solution, but it’s just a fraction of the whole pie. You need to think about the whole solution—-and the moat. It may take 5 to 10 years to develop your moat. Be patient and be observant.

Good luck.

> Writing software is not a differentiator. It’s not a shortcut to big bucks. It’s not a solution in itself. It’s just a tool. Anything you can write in a week (or 3 months) can be done by 100,000 other people—-in a week (or 3 months).

> You have to start with a problem, defined by a large group of people, that you have the experience and expertise to solve in a unique and valuable way.

That precise argument is why I didn't make Slack. And yet Slack is a lots-of-dollars business, made by people who, as far as I can see, started with no more expertise in the domain than any of us who've ever worked for a big company has.

As I get older I'm more and more convinced that actually doing anything at all can be a differentiator.

Doing a thing, and doing it well is a really good differentiator! The thing about software is that it scales way easier than a Korean bakery, so the brand itself is the important differentiation. If you can identify a need in the market and throw the right pieces at it, and spend 6-months building it in secret, that 6-month head start building your product and adding features before you release to the public is your moat. Yeah it's not the deepest moat but those features are a moat nonetheless and you can totally build a successful business on top of that. Anybody that starts after you launch is going to be 6 months behind and forever playing catch-up.

Did Slack even spend 6 months building something in secret? Microsoft and everyone else were already in that space. If anything it felt like Slack were the ones playing catch-up.

ah yeah that's a fair point. Look at Skype, they've been doing video calls since approximately the beginning of the public Internet. Yet zoom was still able to become the dominant cross-platform video chat app. So that "build in private for 6 months and be ahead of your competitors" isn't a one size fits all tactic. "doing it better" is another good moat.

It's not a "moat" in any meaningful sense as far as I can see. Doing it better isn't a particularly defensible position, it's just something you can win by doing.

You have to rotate your thinking 90° to see things my way (you don't have to. your opinion is as valid as mine, I think my reasoning make me right, but I'm biased). But your moat is how you defend your castle, and, outside of having a patent on the core piece, all moats only take time and money to shovel in enough dirt to be moot. Does Tesla have a moat? They have a huge head start on EVs, and being vertically integrated to a degree that other car makers are trying to catch up to. They'll eventually get to where Tesla is in 2023, but by that time, Tesla is going to be ahead by however many years it took them to get there.

> As I get older I'm more and more convinced that actually doing anything at all can be a differentiator.

Indeed. This has always been true, and will always be true. Thus the old saw about how "80% of success is just showing up."

>Thus the old saw about how "80% of success is just showing up."

I'm old and I saw that when I was young.

>actually doing anything at all can be a differentiator.

The other 20% is taking action like so many do not do.

Yeah!! Wrote a blog post about this recently: https://startupspeed.substack.com/p/mental-shifts-for-deep-t...

Maybe that’s your clue that your idea is bad then? YC likely has decided it’s not in their interest to badmouth your idea, but if you are making the 20th data pipeline company in the same batch, maybe the smart thing to do is take a step back and ask yourself “is this really what I want to spend 5 years in?”

From what I hear in the YC YouTube videos, it’s clear that the partners quickly form an image of how much brutal feedback you can take and measure their responses accordingly. My suspicion is that they are unable to gauge who’s good at that brutal feedback until you’re well into the program and they would rather have 100 grifters for that one golden founder who can truly take feedback. I suspect that one founder gets a very different treatment from everyone else. Clearly OP was not that 1 in hundred.

If you approach YC with this mindset, you can make a decision before you even join whether this is worth it for you - are you ready to easily take brutal feedback and adjust or are you like OP going to double down on marketing or whatever you think is the key to succeeding? In the latter case just don’t bother I guess!

W.r.t bad ideas, I'll just leave you with this PG quote [1]

Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors. Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors. So better a good idea with competitors than a bad one without.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

I'm not sure where anyone said marketing doesn't matter, even YC will say that "build it and they will come" is false. But, talking to customers face to face or in person is much more valuable that marketing, because you experience first hand what the customer wants in a way that is not very doable with just marketing.

This logic just implies YC is more relevant than ever.

If there's 10-15 players in the space and you're the one with YC connections...

Meanwhile if there are barely any players in your niche you have time to get things wrong and iterate in isolation, no need for the all-or-nothing style of growth

I think parent's (and OP's) point was that YC was more valuable for investing and strategy, but less valuable for finding customers.

And since customers are the most difficult part now (because 10-15 players), it adjusts the relative value of something that doesn't help you acquire customers.

IOW, the differences between a "build it and they will come" historic era and a "make me care about you" modern one.

I don't agree, the parent's point is directly attacking strategy:

> a lot of YC advice, especially w.r.t. what to prioritize, is from an era of startups about 10-15 years ago.

I'm saying any misalignment in strategy matters less than implied. I spend a lot of time with current and past YC founders these days, and the recurring thought has always been "if you know already know business they're not going to teach you that much".

> it adjusts the relative value of something that doesn't help you acquire customers.

Money is how you acquire customers. From outlasting competitors to advertising to improving your product, it's money that turns into customers. So YC being valuable for investing is tantamount to being valuable for gaining customers.

YC has never taught "build it and they will come" – they give plenty of advice and encouragement to find customers and will add, er, kinetic energy if you're not actively on that. That's a huge focus.

This, however, not so much:

> "You basically need 1-2 full time staff doing nothing but content creation and social media outreach marketing"

If that's the way you're thinking, YC's going to try to change your mind, and if you don't want to change your mind about that, YC's probably not a good fit.

(I'm not speaking for YC here! just from my own experience as a founder, observer, HN mod)

What’s your startup Dang? :)

Dan and Scott Bell did Skysheet.

Super interesting.

Do you have an example in mind where a startup excels through marketing in a crowded niche with the mentioned 10-15 startups?

In the crypto space currently, there are projects that excel in terms of technological merits, making them far superior to their competition. However, the competition often has better marketing and generates more hype and win the market.

Technological merits are not the product.

I don't think that's true for crypto companies with actual customers (like coinbase) but rather the ones that are surviving on hype/investment alone, which all crash sooner or later, and aren't really companies. Just fluff.

Laravel, Vercel, come to mind.

Your comment put me in mind of something I saw in 1999 or so; where a local newscast in Austin profiled a local start-up and included:

"We can't discuss what we do because someone else could take the idea and beat us to it."

That was the beginning of the dot-com bust.

Yep. I've heard that sentiment more times than I can count over the decades -- and in every single case, without exception, those ventures failed pretty hard.

I think its because the sentiment expresses a fundamental misunderstanding of how business works and what makes it successful. The idea is not the most important ingredient in a business, the execution is.

For the most part, it doesn't matter if someone else takes your idea and beats you to it as long as your offering is better at solving the customer's problem. And that's a matter of execution.

> every worthwhile niche seems to have 10-15 companies in it in no time

B2B in established industries can be much more open, though often requires a level of domain knowledge to enter.