HN user
Models inherently lack a business model so they need to find one. They have monster cap tables and firepower but lack a durable core revenue engine. This leads them to go up and down the stack - cloud, api, coding, chips, devices, ad revenue, etc. -are all on the table. This is why you see them fighting with their own ecosystems and partners. Till ModelCo's find stable business models, the wars will continue. No one is safe.
NVIDIA was a small cap in 2016. Netflix was a small cap in 2016.
Intel was the leader. Comcast was the leader.
Yes Google and Apple have done great but its because they have made some good strategic decisions. And some (not all) of their failures of last 10 years fall sqaurely in stack fallacy.
thanks. :) [og author here]
Yes, when I wrote this article - I was pointing out that we seem to have missed this rather common pattern. And if you understand this pattern you can avoid some strategy mistakes.
I didn't claim that this one pattern explains all of the failures.
exactly. it took longer for Apple to fix its Maps app - and to this day their email app is nowhere as good as most third party apps. Even iMessage is lacking features that WhatsApp and Signal built 5 years ago. (And iMessage is clearly their best app.)
this whole thread is hilarious and yet quite insightful.
Yes, the core idea behind Stack Fallacy was that if you are Apple you don't need to build a better CPU than Intel for all workloads - you just need M3 for your Mac.
So yes - just one type of bread. Like Subway. Or Panera.
Love the name. I wish I had called it Sandwich fallacy instead. (I am the author.)
Oh wow - interesting to see this up again. I am the author of The Stack Fallacy. #AMA
I am now founder of Skyflow, we are runtime AI data security platform. This is my third startup, and previously I ran strategy for Salesforce.
This is sad. This was avoidable. There’s no recession as far as the eye can see. There’s a crypto recession.
Let’s go back to building real tech.
By that definition, everything is a trillion dollar market. :)
I have seen fully encrypted end to end flows to Twilio. You got it 99% right here.
(There's some nuance around re-encryption proxies and how that is handled.)
@xori, homomorphic has scale challenges. curious what you think of it and have you seen it in production? also, have you heard of polymorphic?
(BYOK is an extremely important feature for this category.)
I am founder & CEO of Skyflow PII data privacy vault. We are vaguely similar but our product line is focused on offering "PII database as a service" - and not really relays and cages. Happy to answer any questions.
To answer your question: "market for encrypting data" is infinite but in reality that's not really a market since encryption is a concept and not really a product.
The markets that do exist are: * GDPR & CCPA compliance (think OneTrust) * Data Residency (think Cloudflare) * Data Security as a Service (think Okta/Auth0) * Customer Data Management (think CRM)
How do you build a business in the shadow of AWS, GCP, and Azure as a startup? How do you find the white spaces? What areas have they over/under invested in? What other startups are doing in those spaces?
Greylock spent months investigating and mapping these out. If you are a founder in infra/cloud, you want to understand the lay of the land.
I will happily pay $30/month for Mighty. The browser is literally where I spent 100% of my time. The pattern of hosted/virtualized browsers is well understood for over a decade but mostly built and delivered poorly for the low end of the market. I love this idea, and I am happy Suhail is building this. (I am not an investor or a customer, yet.)
"Ever since I left Facebook board, I have become convinced its the new diabetes."
(Ok, I wrote that.)
"I guess my takeaway is that the companies can in fact take these arenas, but they underestimate the challenge."
Yes. And their core mistake is not understanding the real needs of the customer because they make assumptions in a familiar territory.
agreed. Its just hard to have title that says "Why some companies fail repeatedly".
All of us are competing with "17 people under 30"... listicles.
I am the author. Happy to answer any questions about my post.
This is exactly what I (writer of the article) wanted to communicate. I wish I had said it as clearly.
I agree with you on the problem with moving up.
Not so sure about the gradual move up. Another path is to acquire and let them lead. Another is to appreciate the nuance and hire great product people.
You need to find customer problems that you understand and can solve, not chase markets up the stack because they are bigger and "look easy".
I (author) didn't say it's hard to move up from (only) engineering side. It's hard to move up from customer empathy perspective. Hence the emphasis on what to build. It's a product strategy question.
Yes many open source projects suffer from this too. We as engineers (even former ones) often assume the what to build is "obvious". This is often not true, if ever.
The best open source projects are ones where engineers are the end users (customers).
They think they know their competencies (database systems in one case, virtualization in another) but often they misunderstand what customers really value up the stack - in this example, Workday customers really don't care if it runs Oracle or MySQL or non RDBMS at all. In AWS case, we don't care for kvm vs VMware wars.
(I am the author of the TechCrunch post.)
Exactly. When you go down the stack like Amazon did with AWS, you know your customer (often you). You also know the key pain points and gaps in the market. This is especially so in "as a service" markets.
Me likes iOS. It seems to be the easiest for me to understand.
There are 32 from Indian Institutes of Technology. (But the data is under various names.) IITs (acronym) are unique because its a really small system - graduating 2500 students across all 5 IITs in 1996 for example. Would be one of the few foreign university systems to bubble up.
How: Look for the words or substring "Indian Institute" and "IIT".