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Comment by shrisukhani | Hacker News Reader

> What you can control is the market you're in, your team, and the unique insight that you bring as the founder. Your job as a founder is to leverage these strengths to get to PMF.

Agree with everything here except (maybe I'm contrarian) the 'unique insight that you bring as the founder' part. I'm fairly convinced that unique insight is just a VC pitch thing. In reality, the market is too efficient for your 'unique insight' to really benefit you all that much beyond your Seed or Series A pitch. There will almost certainly be plenty of competitors ripping you off and at least one or two funded by other top-tier VCs. If the only thing you have different is your 'authentic unique insight', you're going to lose anyway.

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If you listen to Jensen Huang, founder on NVIDIA speak at Stanford about how NVIDA was able to succeed as a GPU company when there were many, many companies building graphics cards in the 90s, he has a single answer to the question "Perspective". Unfortunately I can no longer find the video of this lecture. I've tried for months now. I watched it about 10 years ago online and this statement about perspective always stuck with me. He basically says that NVIDIA's/his unique perspective on the graphics chip market and where it was going was what allowed nvidia to succeed in the market where others would fail.

The unique insight the founder brings is what differentiates them from other founder/teams going after the same market at the same (right) time.

I am not sure what you mean by "market is too efficient", but the market chooses your product because it built with the unique insight that makes it the preferred choice among other choices that were built with less superior insights. If you mean that all companies collapses on the same "efficient" product, this just isn't true. Businesses are not efficient in this regard and are actually very stubborn. Usually by the time it's given that one insight was critical, the company that began with it has an insurmountable lead.

EDIT: I found the video. It even has a labelled section called "perspective and why it matters". My memory was bad and that he was using yahoo and search engine as an example here. But the point stands. Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn1EsFe7snQ

EDIT EDIT: He does follow on to talk about GPUs and competition in 1995 and why perspective matters. My memory is on point. Phew. Such a good video. Watching again.

What a great video. We need more like these, direct founder perspectives with no bullshit. Any other examples you like?

Thanks for sharing, really curious to watch the video now. What I’m wondering before I do, though, is whether this isn’t that just an instance of survivorship bias? If there was another winner in the GPU space, you could be sharing video of someone else’s unique perspective, no?

Related, there was a rather interesting episode in the Netflix documentary about gaming industry history (High Score, E4 This is War). The episode is about Sega console and how it succeeded over Nintendo and others. It shows the strategy of the Sega CEO and I’ve wondered since then if the strategy of the CEO was just his genius, luck of the market circumstances, or just survivorship bias.

> I'm fairly convinced that unique insight is just a VC pitch thing

Ask HN: do the great majority of competitors improperly understand the core insights behind a product?

When I have been involved with successful products in the past, most competitors were ineffective because to me it seemed they missed something critical to the success of our product. Effective competitors are rare in my experience. Are startups in this decade better at grokking the core insights and improving upon that? Disclaimer: my experience is in the wopwops on the edge of the world (New Zealand), and I am also out of date.

Also, it is my impression that what everyone “knows” is important to a product market is often well off the mark (morphic-resonance gone wrong ;-). If lucky, we all finally catch up with the insight that a founder had, but only after the insight has lost its unique value (maybe a few years). The cliché of yelling a valuable idea and nobody hearing it (part of the insight’s value is often that it is misunderstood - sometimes even though it has already been proven valuable!).

Obviously the only competitor that would matter is the one that understood the insights. But does that competitor always exist… In a complex dynamic market the efficient market theory is wrong in practice I believe.

I linked a video below of Jensen Huang founder of NVIDIA speaking at Stanford. He says at one point in the 90s there were 100s of companies in their space and he goes on to list a series of unique insights/perspectives they had that led to become the last one standing. NVIDIA understood the insights that mattered.

I would say a more modern example of this the insight that to build the best mobile phone product, you need to design the hardware, operating system and APIs (and thus first party apps) together as a single thing. Apple brought this insight from their past experience building less sophisticated computers. They knew a phone given it's size and use case would require this to an even _greater_ degree.

Google on the other hand, based on their experience of working in open ecosystems and linux machines from server to desktop, thought the phone market would extend from an open OS platform. This was their perspective/insight.

Ultimately, the company that won this argument was Apple. We know this because Google has finally adopted this truth that Apple knew all along with the Pixel hardware lineup. Furthermore, the Android phones that succeeded today have nothing to do with the fact they are "Android". Samsung phones are about the Samsung ecosystem. Choosing Android is more important to the OEM than the user because of the app ecosystem that cannot be bootstrapped from scratch any more. Android is the developer/oem platform, not the user platform.

Now, think about how long it took Google to finally give in to that insight? These perspectives lead to very stubborn decision making. This perspective was often a debatable thing for a long time. It's no longer. Hence I think everything you said here is right and aligned what what we see in one of the biggest product categories on the planet right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn1EsFe7snQ

Amazing video thank you. From ~2009 that keeps hammering the unique perspective topic, especially during formation in 1993 and change of focus in 1998. I would be interested to know which of the failed hundreds of competitors had the same “unique perspective”, but maybe just failed because another leg of the company was too weak.

Successful companies have a few core perspectives that they nail with A grades, but they have to get a C grade in all other areas of the business. It can take only one F grade in one topic to make a business fail. The meta-skill of recognising and fixing a critical failing is hard to learn.

Edit: I love Jen-Hsun’s definition of a startup starting about 57:50: a startup is an enterprise that is nearly out of business all the time.

Yes it would be interesting. 3DFX was the big 3D chip company at the time when NVIDIA was still in fight mode. I know this because I remember wanting a 3DFX Voodoo 2 card so badly. I just checked wiki and it sounds like 3DFX died due to mismanagement. In the chip industry missing timing or delivery of a product cycle or two at that stage would be deadly. So in the case of 3DFX the execution leg might just have been weak. Would be interesting to go back and analyze all of these company cases though.

Jen-Hsun interviews Morris Chang https://youtube.com/watch?v=u-x7PdnvCyI

Long interview, but I think it has moments where it reinforces the same concept that it is very difficult to copy a business, even if the CEO is directly telling you their secrets. Interesting interview - although exponentially above my pay grade.

> Ultimately, the company that won this argument was Apple. We know this because Google has finally adopted this truth that Apple knew all along with the Pixel hardware lineup.

I'm not convinced that Pixel hardware is anything other than reference designs: each device is developed from a clean slate and none sell in appreciable numbers

> Samsung phones are about the Samsung ecosystem.

What Samsung ecosystem? Samsung makes fantastic stand-alone hardware, but it's no ecosystem. No one buys Samsung earbuds because they work particularly well with the Galaxy 22, or their calendar and music are already integrated with Bixby

Does Google make the design files for the Pixel phones available to Android partners under NDA?

The value of a reference design is basically zero without the schematics/layout and BSP. Or do you just mean upstreaming BSP drivers?

Schematics can be reverse-engineered in a few days, I suspect; there's no point to hide it.

The interesting part is the choice of components, the rationale behind that choice, and the software support.

I suppose that Google makes available the Android OS with support for all the new capabilities as they emerge (OLED, NFC, fingerprint scanners, etc) which OEMs can leverage with their hardware and closed-source software (both apps and drivers).

The Pixel line is the Google's vision of the platform, with Google's control over hardware implementation and a commitment to support it (longer than many OEMs but not nearly as great as iPhones).

“Reference design” is a term of art in electrical engineering, not aspirational product marketing. Reverse engineering 10-20 layer mixed signal PCBs with buried microvias is nontrivial and is the exact opposite of what reference designs are supposed to be.

> “Reference design” is a term of art in electrical engineering, not aspirational product marketing.

Root comment author here: I used the term mostly in mockery of the hobby-level effort Google has put into Pixel in the past. However, when it cones to Android devices the lines are blurred between "reference design" and "competitor flagship".

Consider:

* Android's roadmap is controlled by Google, which decides which features go into the next release. Once those features are in the codebase, they can be used by any OEM

* OHA OEMs get early access to upcoming Android versions and work with Google

* Android devices share the same set of suppliers for sensors/chips/SoC/modems: this is highly commoditized. Once the API & drivers for a feature are there, any OEM will have an easier time implementing it; perhaps choosing a different part number in the same product line.

So Google in not sharing its circuit diagrams & CAD files, but the OEMs don't have to reverse-engineer anything post-release either. The reality is someplace inbetween: cooperative development

I assume people who own samsung phones and want a smartwatch buy a galaxy watch and not an apple watch. Or am I wrong about this?

A person who owns a Samsung phone gets the same functionality from any Wear OS watch, of which the Galaxy watch is one of many (the Pixel watch is just as compatible with their phone as a Galaxy watch). Google owns the ecosystem, Samsung has to rely on brand loyalty - not an ecosystem, because it doesn't have one, despite its years-long efforts (Samsung app Store, Bixby, and other duplicates to Google's services)

I think Samsung has a lot more power than you are suggesting here. Samsung is what ties together a Windows Laptop, an Android phone and a Tizen TV. As for wearOS I see your point with Google owning this compatibility layer, but it doesn’t carry much weight when there are a mere handful of devices to mix and match with. There is just not much leverage created out of spending the time and effort to make the ecosystem. How many combinations of Android TV products pair up with Android phones?

> Samsung is what ties together a Windows Laptop, an Android phone and a Tizen TV.

This is mostly hypothetical - does Samsung actually do that in practice? I haven't heard of anyone using -, nor am I aware of Samsung publicizing any such unifying services.

I own several Samsung devices, and have a Samsung account, and it is something of an annoyance to use. The power/potential is there no doubt, but services aren't a Samsung core competency.

Pixel is not reference design. If you go any major city with mass transit, you’ll notice that Google has absolutely taken over physical advertising space with Pixel 7 spots. Watch any NBA game and you’ll see the same thing.

I understand why one would bucket Pixel hardware into that old played out “reference hardware”. That has been Google’s approach over the years.

But herein lies my point: Google has changed their tune. The top brass have now bought into the integration of hw, sw and services ecosystem that Apple had set out with from the get go. This isn’t some Googler asking Sundar for budget so they can make some vanilla smartphone. This is Sundar putting a stake in the ground with real long term budget to saying: 10 years from now, if we continue to execute on pixel, the US market and perhaps more will be a healthier mix of Apple and Google phones. And I think a reasonable target is like 2:1 iphone to Pixel.

Given the importance of the phone as the primary computing device in peoples lives and the amount of profit Google draws in from consumer computing activity, and the lack of leverage Google really has over other OEMs phones, it is super important for Google to eventually hit something like 2 iphones to 1 pixel in sales. Its no a long shot either. With enough money and time this will happen.

> the market is too efficient for your 'unique insight' to really benefit you all that much beyond your Seed or Series A pitch

It feels like the HN community combines a poor understanding of economics with a religious-like capitalist zeal into beliefs that, at least to my eyes, appear absurd or even farcical.

Is everyone the same? Do they all have access to the same information at the same time? Do conditions never change in asymmetric ways?

Unique insight can also mean something that you deeply believe that isn't obvious on the surface. E.g. Doordash with their suburb strategy - I'm sure lots of other delivery companies heard about suburbs. None of them took it seriously enough to really invest heavily into suburbs. And, Doordash is now one of the top delivery companies.

Lower density means longer delivery trips and fewer orders delivered in one trip. It was (and still is) a higher-hanging fruit than delivery in dense cities, maybe requiring deeper pockets than, say, GrubHub / Seamless had.

In my experience, the founder(s) are one of the few people who will be able to push and innovate as others start to copy you. I think PMF is a continuum and what is PMF for $1M ARR is highly unlikely to be sufficient to get you to $10M ARR which will require more evolution to get to $25M ARR.

Your argument is a “unique insight” isn’t enough to provide an enduring competitive advantage (or “moat”). But that’s not what the OP is talking about.

A unique insight (and great timing / market) is often enough to get to early PMF (and - like you mention - to Series A).

unique insights come from your perspective. It is your unique perspective which is a _factory_ for unique insights that allow you to solve a series of problems that hit your startup/company in succession. It is this durable perspective that has built up through long term experience that can't easily be copied/duplicated that makes you win a market.

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