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Comment by mst | Hacker News Reader

If nothing else, having competition helps validate the market.

Which is often an advantage to all companies involved - a lot of the time, you're only notionally competing with each other, your main enemy is "people not using a product in that space at all."

e.g. for a lot of business SaaS the only enemy worth caring about is Excel.

(I've more than once been involved with companies where the "competitors" were all on friendly terms because convincing people that using *some* product in that space was a good idea expanded everybody's addressable market)

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I see it more as more of a hedge. If you believe in the opportunity, placing extra bets makes sense. Uber and Lyft weren't the only ride share companies but sometimes luck wins out and sometimes execution does.

Additionally, if one seems to be winning, you just acqui-hire the "loser" in the winner, use that problem space expertise to scale faster AND you still get to claim a higher exit rate even if it was just to yourself.

Exactly right. Traditional VCs come up with a thesis and then buy 20% of the company they think will be the winner who fits that thesis when they're at like $1M to 10M revenue (series A)

YC can instead get ~10% of every plausible winner they come across when they're at $0 revenue

As noted elsethread, I think that almost certainly *is* what's going on; I was explaining why it's probably a good thing from (at least many of) the companies' perspectives too.

Sure, though I'm not sure that "I see it more as" makes sense in context given -

You're talking about how YC sees it.

I was talking about how it affects things from the companies's point of view when YC does that.

As such, so far as I can see our actual statements about the upshot of the situation are probably both correct :)

    > sometimes luck wins out and sometimes execution does

Can you provide an example when lucks wins over execution?

Yes, this can happen. How often and under what conditions I’m not sure.

I’ll give some other lenses:

1. From the point of view of an individual person, growth in the overall market is often an advantage. If one company doesn’t survive, there will be probably be others. Your skills and connections can help in a similar organization with a slightly different angle on the problem.

2. From the point of view of memetics, good business ideas are likely to appear and survive and take many forms in many niches. If you find yourself with competition, this can suggest that the underlying ideas are suited to the current environment. (Warning: this tendency can be distorted by irrational herd behavior and intentional gaming.)

Yes, and as a variant on (1) from the point of view of potential *customers* it makes adoption (at least feel) less risky because if your original chosen supplier goos *poof* there'll be another one to switch to rather than you having to re-adjust your internal processes to go without.

(I'm not sure under what conditions either, I mostly know this from having lived it and I wasn't on the business side in any such cases so)

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