Comment by RajT88
5 months ago
> This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow.
You've almost captured the full picture of it.
If you have a great idea, it's not going to be self-evidently enough of a great idea until you've proved it can make money. That's the hard part which comes at great personal, professional and financial risk.
Algorithms are cheap. Sure, they could use your LLM history to figure out what you did. Or the LLM could just reason it out. It could save them some work, sure.
But again - the hard part is not cloning the product, it's stealing your customers. People don't seem to be focused on the hard parts.
Yeah, and the big guys can't steal your customers. What a crazy idea.
The point is - they're going to do that anyways if they want to. Owning the LLM platforms makes it marginally cheaper to do so.
It's not the risk it's being made out to be.
Absolutely. The fact that they know your app better than you do, and that they can revoke your ability to develop it at any moment, those are just details. Those things won't change the game at all.
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I don't think the risk is that they copy your app.
The risk is that they make the category a built-in feature in something people already use. At that point, copying the product and taking the customers start to look like the same problem.
Yup, pre-cog Sherlocking. The mass keeps accreting towards the already too large players.
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> But again - the hard part is not cloning the product, it's stealing your customers. People don't seem to be focused on the hard parts.
Big companies seem to be bad at innovating but really, really good at enterprise sales.
I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. I do think that a big part of enterprise sales involves building a comprehensive solution that works well within the customer’s ecosystem. Start-ups usually tend to build point products, which have value, but are still missing functionality (even if that functionality is not scintillating) that customers really desire to easily deploy and maintain solutions. Also, customers do care about things like stability of their vendors and the level of available support.
I'm not saying it is always the case but does it not match your experience that big orgs like Microsoft are much better at navigating the enterprise sales process than a typical startup? Not to mention how many of those startups are just answering security questionnaires and other procurement gates with AI.
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I've seen big companies manage to duplicate startup-like culture with small teams internally. Weird things like directors handling builds and source control duties. 12 hour days, working weekends.
These teams said that per man-hour they brought more value to the company than any other team. (But you know, they all say that)
> But again - the hard part is not cloning the product, it's stealing your customers.
Yes. A Red Hat, a Microsoft -- these companies have processes, organizational structure, politics, friction, etc. They might like your products, but replicating them might not be easy for reasons that have nothing to do with how easy it is given the freedom to do it. Small shops with vision might well have a bright future, for a while, maybe.