Thread by @aayushjaiswal07

Great companies were built by:

- Being the first
- Being the best
- Being different

I was reading up more on the last mover advantage which @reliancejio io often has & it's fascinating. Read on..

Some of the best startups were built by focusing on small markets that often went unnoticed by the giants.

As the market grows at a high rate, the company grows with it until it explodes.

At an early stage, the company's focus is always on growth...

This requires not just growth in operations or management but the onus to grow the market often lies with some of the companies that are early into the market..

Educating customers about the offering & making them realize the value & "build habits" takes time and capital.

There are multiple other problems that companies need to solve on the way which takes up their bandwidth & resources.

Example: Use of cash by Flipkart/Ola which Amazon/Uber took some time to adopt.

But once the market is ready, the fight for staying relevant starts...

Staying relevant for decades slowly becomes the priority for companies that just burned large amounts of capital in educating the market & establishing their presence.

They're the market leaders but maybe just for time being...

Because this is the "perfect timing" in the lifecycle of a large company, in a freshly brewed market for someone to enter with the "last mover advantage"

If this "someone" has a way to scale up distribution, the cost of innovation & market penetration is done by the competition.

This is when having a moat is so much critical. In a time when companies are moving away from growth and towards relevance, no company can afford to be in that position without a strong moat.

Maybe constantly thinking about moat should be a separate function with startups...

This might go down as one of the biggest lessons for the ecosystem if Jio pulls off the war against some major players on multiple fronts.

An interesting thought experiment for the weekend none the less.