Thread by @amasad

Competition is for losers.

How to win without competing, a thread:

We grew up in a very competitive field. Online environments have more dead startups than alive. We zoomed past startups 10x our size and capitalization, and we thrive despite incumbents many orders of magnitude larger than us.

We do it while rarely thinking about competition.

First, an axiom: humans are memetic creatures.

Remember how every startup was a chatbot startup a few years ago? Or a more recent example: Metaverse. Facebook renamed to Meta and two days later Microsoft announced their Metaverse strategy. I'm sure IBM is working on it too.

So by default, humans will get stuck in an ever increasing copying cycle. I call this the Metagame, it's much comfortable to exist in it instead of playing the real game, one where you're judged by users and the market -- not by your peers.

amasad.me/meta

When you obsess over other companies, you ignore the only thing that matters: The customer.

Companies who are customer obsessed will naturally do things differently because they won’t be moved by hype and noise.

Customer obsession is necessary but not sufficient. Ford famously said that if he only listened to his customers they would’ve asked for faster horses. This is true. To invent the future you need customer input but you also need to think differently, to think radically.

At Replit we always ask ourselves "what's the radical thing to do here?" a question that forces you to think from first principles. We are okay with being short-term wrong as long as we're aligning with where we think the future is headed.

https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1352042106127220737

Which brings me to longterm thinking. At Replit, we don't think in quarters, we think in years. We know that the investments we make today won't show up in our numbers for another year or two, and we're okay with that.

Finally, if you align with the future, make sure to try to influence your peers to bring it about faster. When we made a contrarian bet on Nix we didn't just sit around and hope people understood. We've been evangelizing it. blog.replit.com/nix-vs-docker

It's more fun to invent the future. It's great to get inspired by each other -- and we love our peers who inspire us to be better -- but also make sure to listen to your customers, think from first principles, and be longterm focused 🙂