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Comment by OsrsNeedsf2P | Hacker News Reader

> If you are an early stage startup and your founders have a habit of talking about "competitors", run like hell.

Why? Comparing what the competitors are doing can be a great way to come up with new ideas

because comparing yourself to your competitors will get you a faster horse buggy, not an automobile. if you're in a startup, you should be risking making automobiles. if you want to make faster horse buggies, go work for AT&T.

Good ideas need the right timing to line up. AT&T can afford to keep a research project around until the timing is right where a startup needs to find market fit immediately.

i'm not sure that is true about AT&T. you may be thinking about Bell Labs, which effectively destroyed it's culture in the 90s or early 2000s.

but i take your point to mean there are large companies that have budget to maintain projects that do not have an immediate need to be profitable. and agree that for startups, it's a great idea if you're building things for which a market is emerging. everyone talks about how Steve Jobs is a miracle worker. not to diminish his accomplishments, but he was also very lucky. he wanted to sell apple 2's into a market that was just starting to want to buy apple 2's. i'll give him the iPhone, however. i think he was smart enough to understand the forces were aligning to make a product that your average user would like.

but apple didn't spend 30 years making the iPhone. they had to wait 'til the market was there and manufacturing costs were low enough and bandwidth was available. i'm mostly agreeing w/ you, but i think ideas can weave in and out of companies and organizations. CALO jumped from DARPA to SRI to Apple to Quato and motivated several more startups.

Before the 1990s, Bell Labs was the research arm of the world's largest and richest telecommunications monopoly. That explains the difference between old and new Bell Labs.

Wiki says:

    > With the breakup of the Bell System, Bell Labs became a subsidiary of AT&T Technologies in 1984, which resulted in a drastic decline in its funding.

Ah, the mythical secret weakness of all startups: another startup doing the same thing.

of course. how else would they get funded?

Your competitors are not necessarily targeting the same users, and their internal strengths and weaknesses are different from yours. All comparisons to competitors are superficial and distract you from building what your users want and improving upon your internal strengths and weaknesses.

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