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Comment by salman89 | Hacker News Reader

Great examples. How do you think this would apply in Dalton's case though, where the very mechanism of building on Facebook/Twitter's platform can be shut down by Facebook/Twitter?

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I don't know. But unless you have a strategy, don't start a company. Without a strategy you're just picking up nickles in front of a steamroller.

I'm sure that strategies exist on any platform. Zynga doesn't seem worried that Facebook will copy its games (even if they do hate paying the platform tax). Many products are pretty safe from Facebook. For example, build an app for dentists, or personal trainers, or pregnant women.

There only is one sure strategy for avoiding the potential steamroller of the platform company. Don't build on the platform.

Like any other resource or dependency that you build into your business, using a platform requires an ROI calculation of some sort. The distribution advantage needs to be worth the risk.

True. The point however is to understand how to quantify the risk. The complicating factor in this case is surely the fact that he had received explicit assurances that his development was welcome and would be supported. The thing I don't understand is how you would go about assessing the 'distribution advantage' given the fact that the risk is evidently so hard to evaluate. DC has evidently now come to the conclusion that it is too risky for him no matter what the advantage. I am curious to better understand your thinking on how to weigh advantage against risk.

Treat the 'explicit assurances' like politicians' campaign promises. If they lose, the promises are irrelevant. If they win, those promises had better align with the new incumbent's larger aims or they were just marketing.

The risk is not very hard to assess. It's pretty binary per startup opportunity. Do the relevant incumbents' revenue models, distribution models, or inherent cultural limitations prevent them from competing with you. @paulsutter covered the first two well early in this discussion. For the last, Apple has great difficulty with social, Facebook hasn't figured out Touch, Google is excessively focused on those two competitors, etc.

Please also see these two comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4336783 http://rafer.net/post/28638883246/mark-i-know-for-a-fact-tha...,

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