Comment by nl
1 day ago
It doesn't have one goal.
In fact driving out competition is rarely the goal at all.
Instead the goal is usually to reduce the barrier to people trying the thing - especially when it is a developer API which you hope developers will incorporate into their product.
AI company founder and CTO defends those practices… yawn.
> In fact driving out competition is rarely the goal at all.
Driving out competition is definitely a goal, the further you can snowball that makes your company a much more attractive investment since your competition will be bleeding money, attrition is definitely used as a tactic by VCs when a startup gets traction. Hell, it's one of the arguments they use to run further rounds of investments to others "this startup is very well capitalised and the competition has 1/10th of their funds, investing elsewhere is a losing proposition".
> Instead the goal is usually to reduce the barrier to people trying the thing - especially when it is a developer API which you hope developers will incorporate into their product.
I thought we were talking about unicorns such as Uber, AirBnb, etc., not some dev startup packaging APIs to serve other startups which is a whole other incestuous industry.