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Paul Graham explains why startups shouldn’t stress over competitors “What makes companies fail most of the time is poor execution by the founders.” Y Combinator has seen over 5000 companies. Very few of them were killed by competitors. “I tell startups that basically you have the same protection against... competitors that light aircraft have against crashing into other light aircraft when flying through clouds — space is large.” When startups freak out about a new competitor, PG advises them: “It’s sort of like if you’re running the hundred meters and suddenly a lane appears with another runner in it. What should you do? Run as fast as you can, just like you presumably were.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)show more

Startup Archive

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27,802 views • 1 year ago •via X (Twitter)

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Startup Archive1 year ago

Watch the full @ycombinator interview with Paul Graham here:

Startup Archive1 year ago

Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read our free newsletter here:

SaaS Growth Strategies1 year ago

Competitors are a concern only if you are not working well enough to be the best in the market. The only thing founders should be concerned about is how to make the best product and advertise well to the market.

Greg Sharples1 year ago

Top quality analogies there @paulg

Jilong | We provide AI marketer - 24/7 marketing1 year ago

After testing 100+ accounts, execution quality beat competitor obsession every time. Let AI handle grunt work while founders focus on strategy. PG's right - own your game.

Alexander Trefonas1 year ago

Also sometimes competitors grow the total market size and their customers often want to check out your product too.

Adam Wagner1 year ago

But where are your shoes? And is there brunch after the race?

Mina el errouze1 year ago

Is he not british ?

Asher1 year ago

The key thing here is that space is indeed large

Não You Know1 year ago

@Nftoria I lost interest in what PG says since he got TDS

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Startup Archive

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Startup Archive

407,653 views • 2 years ago

Q: How do you build a great company? In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through 9 things he has seen the best founders do: #1 Get to know your users really well “The best founders do customer support themselves. They go visit their users—in the case of Airbnb they go live with them. You want to get to know your users really really well.” #2 Have a short cycle time & understand compound growth “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.” #3 Make a long-term commitment “Most companies have a 2-3 year time horizon. But companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work. If you think about it that way from the very beginning, you will make very different and much better decisions. I think this is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market. Almost no one makes a fairly long-term commitment to a new project. But if you do that, you will think in a different way, you will hire different people, and it will work very well.” #4 Stay lean until everything is working really well “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” #5 Resist the urge to hire; especially resist the urge to hire mediocre people “Vinod Khosla has a saying that I love: ‘the team you build is the company you build.’ This is really true and I never appreciated how true this was for a long time. If you build a team of great people and you have a product that people love, you’ll have a 90%+ chance of success. Those are both really hard to do, and they’re independent variables. But don’t ignore the team component. The best CEOs I know spend huge amounts of their time recruiting and retaining good talent.” #6 Relentless execution “You have to keep going, and do things perfectly, and get all of the details right. You have to care too much about every experience that a customer has with your company.” #7 Startups are about not giving up “One of the very best companies in the last YC batch applied 7 times before they got in. This is just a version of what happens in startups all of the time: you get beat down, again, and again, and again. And that last time when you get pushed down and don’t think you have enough energy to get back up—that’s the time it actually works. This is what you sign up for if you’re going to start a startup.” #8 Fiduciary duty to take care of yourself “This is a 10 year marathon and you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to take care of yourself. Some people treat startups like an all-nighter: they don’t take care of their health, they don’t sleep, they don’t maintain their personal relationships. It is true that startups are a bad choice for work-life balance. But you have a duty to yourself, your team, and your investors to take care of yourself.” #9 Clear mission “You don’t have to figure this out on Day 1, but all of the most successful startups I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of pretty quickly—in the first one to two years—figure out a really important mission. It’s this mission that gets people to join them. It drives the founders. It gets the media to write about them. And even if you start off building a project that’s just interesting to you and solves a problem in your life—which is how you should start—remember that you should have a clear mission at some point… That is what will convince people to come help you, and that is how you will build this idea into a huge company with a ton of people that really love your product.”

Q: How do you build a great company? In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through 9 things he has seen the best founders do: #1 Get to know your users really well “The best founders do customer support themselves. They go visit their users—in the case of Airbnb they go live with them. You want to get to know your users really really well.” #2 Have a short cycle time & understand compound growth “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.” #3 Make a long-term commitment “Most companies have a 2-3 year time horizon. But companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work. If you think about it that way from the very beginning, you will make very different and much better decisions. I think this is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market. Almost no one makes a fairly long-term commitment to a new project. But if you do that, you will think in a different way, you will hire different people, and it will work very well.” #4 Stay lean until everything is working really well “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” #5 Resist the urge to hire; especially resist the urge to hire mediocre people “Vinod Khosla has a saying that I love: ‘the team you build is the company you build.’ This is really true and I never appreciated how true this was for a long time. If you build a team of great people and you have a product that people love, you’ll have a 90%+ chance of success. Those are both really hard to do, and they’re independent variables. But don’t ignore the team component. The best CEOs I know spend huge amounts of their time recruiting and retaining good talent.” #6 Relentless execution “You have to keep going, and do things perfectly, and get all of the details right. You have to care too much about every experience that a customer has with your company.” #7 Startups are about not giving up “One of the very best companies in the last YC batch applied 7 times before they got in. This is just a version of what happens in startups all of the time: you get beat down, again, and again, and again. And that last time when you get pushed down and don’t think you have enough energy to get back up—that’s the time it actually works. This is what you sign up for if you’re going to start a startup.” #8 Fiduciary duty to take care of yourself “This is a 10 year marathon and you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to take care of yourself. Some people treat startups like an all-nighter: they don’t take care of their health, they don’t sleep, they don’t maintain their personal relationships. It is true that startups are a bad choice for work-life balance. But you have a duty to yourself, your team, and your investors to take care of yourself.” #9 Clear mission “You don’t have to figure this out on Day 1, but all of the most successful startups I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of pretty quickly—in the first one to two years—figure out a really important mission. It’s this mission that gets people to join them. It drives the founders. It gets the media to write about them. And even if you start off building a project that’s just interesting to you and solves a problem in your life—which is how you should start—remember that you should have a clear mission at some point… That is what will convince people to come help you, and that is how you will build this idea into a huge company with a ton of people that really love your product.”

Michael McGuiness

500,017 views • 2 years ago

Peter Thiel on the importance of starting with a small market “It’s always a big mistake going after a giant market on day 1. That’s typically evidence that you haven’t defined the categories correctly, and there’s going to be too much competition. Almost all of the successful companies in Silicon Valley had some model of starting with small markets and expanding.” Amazon started with books eBay started with Pez dispensers and Beanie Babies PayPal started with power-sellers on eBay Facebook started with Harvard “What’s very counterintuitive about many of these companies is that they often start with markets so small that most people don’t think they’re valuable at all.” The opposite of this is companies that start out targeting really big markets, and he uses clean tech companies in 2005-2008 trying to capture a small percentage of a trillion dollar market as an example: “Once you’re a minnow in a vast ocean, that’s not a good place to be. It means you have tons of competitors, and you don’t even know who all of the competitors are.” As Thiel puts it: “You want to be a one-of-a-kind company where it’s the only one in a small ecosystem… large existing markets typically mean you have tons of competition and it’s very hard to differentiate.” Video source: Y Combinator (2014)

Peter Thiel on the importance of starting with a small market “It’s always a big mistake going after a giant market on day 1. That’s typically evidence that you haven’t defined the categories correctly, and there’s going to be too much competition. Almost all of the successful companies in Silicon Valley had some model of starting with small markets and expanding.” Amazon started with books eBay started with Pez dispensers and Beanie Babies PayPal started with power-sellers on eBay Facebook started with Harvard “What’s very counterintuitive about many of these companies is that they often start with markets so small that most people don’t think they’re valuable at all.” The opposite of this is companies that start out targeting really big markets, and he uses clean tech companies in 2005-2008 trying to capture a small percentage of a trillion dollar market as an example: “Once you’re a minnow in a vast ocean, that’s not a good place to be. It means you have tons of competitors, and you don’t even know who all of the competitors are.” As Thiel puts it: “You want to be a one-of-a-kind company where it’s the only one in a small ecosystem… large existing markets typically mean you have tons of competition and it’s very hard to differentiate.” Video source: Y Combinator (2014)

Startup Archive

71,793 views • 9 months ago

YC CEO Garry Tan: “Moat is not a noun. It’s a verb” Popular belief says startups win because they have one big, game-changing insight. But Varun Mohan (Windsurf CEO) argues that’s a myth. “Every single insight we have is a depreciating insight.” In other words: the value of your insight declines fast. Competitors catch up. Markets shift. What was once novel becomes table stakes. He uses Nvidia as the example: Even at a trillion-dollar scale and 70% gross margins, they still have to innovate, or AMD catches up. The real advantage? Continuously generating new insights — and executing on them. “It’s not about the insight you had one year ago. It’s whether you can compound that advantage over and over again.” That’s why Varun tells his team: being wrong is fine, but being stagnant isn’t. You need to stay sharp, learn from the market, and compound your edge over time. Or as Garry Tan (YC CEO) puts it aptly: “A moat is not a noun. It’s a verb.” Video source: Y Combinator (2025)

YC CEO Garry Tan: “Moat is not a noun. It’s a verb” Popular belief says startups win because they have one big, game-changing insight. But Varun Mohan (Windsurf CEO) argues that’s a myth. “Every single insight we have is a depreciating insight.” In other words: the value of your insight declines fast. Competitors catch up. Markets shift. What was once novel becomes table stakes. He uses Nvidia as the example: Even at a trillion-dollar scale and 70% gross margins, they still have to innovate, or AMD catches up. The real advantage? Continuously generating new insights — and executing on them. “It’s not about the insight you had one year ago. It’s whether you can compound that advantage over and over again.” That’s why Varun tells his team: being wrong is fine, but being stagnant isn’t. You need to stay sharp, learn from the market, and compound your edge over time. Or as Garry Tan (YC CEO) puts it aptly: “A moat is not a noun. It’s a verb.” Video source: Y Combinator (2025)

Startup Archive

232,859 views • 1 year ago

Jensen insists that all Nvidia employees work at the "Speed of Light." He wants their work to be contained only by the laws of physics. Each project must be broken down into its component tasks, and each task must have a target time-to-completion that assumes no delays, queues, or downtime. This sets the theoretical maximum: the "Speed of Light" that it is physically impossible to exceed. Jensen would reprimand subordinates who set goals that referred to what the company had already done before or what the competitors were doing in that moment. As he saw it, he needed to prevent the kind of internal rot that he observed at other companies. We will judge ourselves against the "speed of light." Not what we used to do or what other companies are doing.

Jensen insists that all Nvidia employees work at the "Speed of Light." He wants their work to be contained only by the laws of physics. Each project must be broken down into its component tasks, and each task must have a target time-to-completion that assumes no delays, queues, or downtime. This sets the theoretical maximum: the "Speed of Light" that it is physically impossible to exceed. Jensen would reprimand subordinates who set goals that referred to what the company had already done before or what the competitors were doing in that moment. As he saw it, he needed to prevent the kind of internal rot that he observed at other companies. We will judge ourselves against the "speed of light." Not what we used to do or what other companies are doing.

David Senra

17,678 views • 3 months ago

Obama: If that is the answer to everything, well, why didn't you solve the problem? Why were the number of immigrants basically the same when you left office as when you took office? I will tell you why, because he didn't have a real plan.

Obama: If that is the answer to everything, well, why didn't you solve the problem? Why were the number of immigrants basically the same when you left office as when you took office? I will tell you why, because he didn't have a real plan.

Acyn

275,817 views • 1 year ago

YC Partner Kevin Hale: Marketing is a tax you pay for not making your product remarkable YC Partner and former Wufoo founder (acquired by SurveyMonkey) Kevin Hale is asked how founders should balance working on product with other company priorities like marketing. He gives the following response: “My feeling is you having to spend money on marketing and advertising is usually a tax you pay because you haven’t made your product remarkable. Word of mouth growth is the easiest kind of growth, and it’s how a lot of the great companies grow.” He advises companies: “Figure out how to have a story that people want to tell about your product where they’re the most interesting person at the dinner table. And then that person is your sales force.” Video source: Y Combinator (2014)

YC Partner Kevin Hale: Marketing is a tax you pay for not making your product remarkable YC Partner and former Wufoo founder (acquired by SurveyMonkey) Kevin Hale is asked how founders should balance working on product with other company priorities like marketing. He gives the following response: “My feeling is you having to spend money on marketing and advertising is usually a tax you pay because you haven’t made your product remarkable. Word of mouth growth is the easiest kind of growth, and it’s how a lot of the great companies grow.” He advises companies: “Figure out how to have a story that people want to tell about your product where they’re the most interesting person at the dinner table. And then that person is your sales force.” Video source: Y Combinator (2014)

Startup Archive

37,878 views • 8 months ago