A contrarian sentiment I've heard a lot recently is that "small and focused always wins" in tech. Now, this certainly *felt* right the first time I heard it - off the top of my head, I couldn't actually think of that many counterexamples
But on the other hand, this could just be the availability heuristic at work... so in the interest of intellectual honesty, I sat down for 20 minutes and compiled a list of every small and focused tech company I could think of that ultimately got stomped. Here's what I got:
1) Netscape -> Microsoft 2) Fitbit / Jawbone -> the Apple Watch 3) Lotus Notes -> Microsoft Word 4) Blackberry and Palm -> the iPhone (in the eternal words of Palm CEO Ed Colligan, circa 2006: “PC guys are not going to just figure this out")
5) Rackspace -> Amazon Web Services 6) Rhapsody -> iTunes Store 6) Mapquest -> Google Maps (ok fine Mapquest was owned by AOL already at that point) 7) Literally any adtech company in the late 2000s -> Google (though yes, I suppose they did acquire Doubleclick)
To be honest, this list was harder to put together than I expected (so maybe there's some truth to "small and focused" after all? either that or I just don't know enough failed mid-2000s consumer startups) - I'll probably update this list periodically, always open to suggestions
Two more enterprise names I just thought of: 8) Fusion-io -> Netapp + all the other legacy guys 9) Extreme Networks -> Cisco
Does "small and focused" matter less in enterprise? CIOs don't care about UX, they want one throat to choke, etc... but maybe the cloud changes that?
This tweet from @stevesi reminded me of a good one to add to this list:
10) QuarkXPress -> Adobe Creative Suite (and Adobe probably killed a bunch of other smid-cap companies making "creative" software in the 90s / early 2000s that I've never heard of)
For all of the talk today that Amazon has no focus vs nimbler vertical e-commerce companies, I think it’s pretty tough to argue that Marc Lore was ultimately the victor in the original Amazon-Diapers.com price war
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2/ This paper shows autonomous driving follows the same scaling laws as the rest of ML - performance improves predictably on a log linear basis with data and compute
This is no surprise to anybody working on LLMs, but it’s VERY different from consensus at Waymo a few years ago
3/ Waymo built its tech stack during the pre-scaling paradigm. They train a tiny model on a tiny amount of simulated and real world driving data and then finetune it to handle as many bespoke edge cases as possible
1/ Was this the biggest miss in the history of pharma? Apparently in 1990, Pfizer preemptively abandoned development of the first GLP1 drugs
Ozempic, Zepbound, Wegovy, Mounjaro, etc. were doing $60B+ in runrate revenues at the end of last year. None are made by Pfizer
2/ Source is this retrospective written by Jeffrey Flier (former dean of Harvard Medical School) about his biotech startup MetaBio in the late 1980s: muse.jhu.edu/article/936213
3/ MetaBio was founded in 1987. That was the year Joel Habener first reported GLP-1’s ability to stimulate glucose-dependent insulin secretion - in retrospect, the moment of “discovery” for GLP-1s
MetaBio became the first company in the world to license Habener’s GLP-1 patents
1/ If you really believe LLMs will dramatically compress the cost of software development in 3-5 years, doesn't this obviate the reason for independent software vendors to exist?
This doesn't seem obviously crazy to me - it'd just be a return to the days of mainframes
2/ When IBM invented the mainframe in the 50s, there were no independent software companies - IBM bundled their hardware with a COBOL compiler, which customers then used to write custom software themselves
3/ The world's first independent software vendors (e.g. ADR, Informatics, MSA) all started in the 60s as contract programmers - basically, consultants hired to write custom COBOL for clients - who then realized they could resell that custom code to multiple customers
1/ This internal 2007 Nokia presentation on the first iPhone is a really good example of how incumbents actually get disrupted
Oftentimes, the incumbent already knows what needs to be done. It's just that organizational incentives inhibit the incumbent from doing it
2/ This slide deck was posted on Hacker News earlier this week but just got taken down
I have no idea how they got their hands on a copy but it does look like a legit internal Nokia presentation from strategy team at the timenews.ycombinator.com/item?id=427247…
3/ Contrary to popular belief, people at Nokia in 2007 understood that the iPhone was a big deal
The iPhone's touchscreen would "set a new standard of state-of-art"
Nokia's own user interface paradigm was "in decline"
1/ I just finished a 2.5 week trip through China today, my first visit in about a decade. I was there for family reasons, but it also happened to be my first time in the country as a tech industry observer
My amateur travel journal on the China tech market -
2/ OBSERVATION #1 - Yes, everything really does run on WeChat
If you're a foreign traveler visiting China, you really must set up WeChat Pay and Alipay beforehand. For me, this was the Chinese equivalent of Whatsapp + Chrome + Venmo + my credit card + my subway card + Doordash
3/ I didn't use cash a single time on my 19 day trip. Everybody took WeChat Pay, from Michelin-starred restaurants, to McDonalds, to butchers at the farmers markets in tier 3 cities, to performing musicians in national parks