The investor names only "one way" to succeed (though alluding to a second one that this investor does not name):
>To make a product that fills a heretofore unmet market need, and to do it better, faster, and cheaper than the competition.
This is an insane sentence. Let's make it only slightly more insane to throw it into starker relief:
>To make a product that fills a heretofore unmet market need that nobody has expressed or even thought about until the company announces it, and to do it absolutely perfectly, instantly without any development time, and make it free for the consumer, while getting money from a sustainable high-margin source and having a proprietary moat that makes it impossible for any other market players to enter even a similar market. Also I'll add that the company must have such strong network effect that the utility of any competitor's product is negative (people would regret getting it even for free) unless the competitor is able to get at least 98% market share.
That's pretty insane, and if you re-read what I quoted you will see it's the same kind of insanity.
Why do people even write stuff like this.
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EDIT:
Downvoters don't understand my objection. I'm not going to edit this comment. If you don't get it, you don't get it. This investor literally named "good, fast, cheap" (except as: better, faster, cheaper) as three of four requirements that must be met. (The fourth named requirement being "heretofore unmet".) You cannot get more insane than this except in magical la-la land where there are no trade-offs of any kind. It's absurd.
It's not only a bit silly (I wouldn't say "insane"), it's trite even if it were true. It's the tech wold equivalent of "folksy wisdom" about working hard. There's sort of a truism about it, but it's not useful in the sense that anyone can use it meaningfully.
It is introduced with the sentence "There are a myriad ways to make a company fail, but only two ways to make one succeed" (where the second is left as an exercise for the reader.)
This introductory sentence does not permit the writer to follow up with folksy and false bullshit. This is like my saying "there is only one way to prove that a function will return the correct output for all input", then naming that one way (wrongly, but unironically) as "copy it verbatim from a StackOverflow answer".
The reader deserves more. Writers don't have the liberty to spread such nonsense.
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Edit: I finished reading the article. It is outlandishly wrong. It says "There is a small cadre of people who actually have what it takes to successfully build an NBT (next big thing), and experienced investors are pretty good at recognizing them."
This is demonstrably false: investors are demonstrably bad at recognizing these people, who often go through hundreds of rejections (because investors are bad at recognizing them) before building the next big thing.
Really, this article could hardly be more wrong.
You know less about investing and the world than before you read it.
On the other hand, you learn more about what an angel thinks is happening, so I guess it's a wash.
>To make a product that fills a heretofore unmet market need, and to do it better, faster, and cheaper than the competition.
This is an insane sentence. Let's make it only slightly more insane to throw it into starker relief:
>To make a product that fills a heretofore unmet market need that nobody has expressed or even thought about until the company announces it, and to do it absolutely perfectly, instantly without any development time, and make it free for the consumer, while getting money from a sustainable high-margin source and having a proprietary moat that makes it impossible for any other market players to enter even a similar market. Also I'll add that the company must have such strong network effect that the utility of any competitor's product is negative (people would regret getting it even for free) unless the competitor is able to get at least 98% market share.
That's pretty insane, and if you re-read what I quoted you will see it's the same kind of insanity.
Why do people even write stuff like this.
-
EDIT:
Downvoters don't understand my objection. I'm not going to edit this comment. If you don't get it, you don't get it. This investor literally named "good, fast, cheap" (except as: better, faster, cheaper) as three of four requirements that must be met. (The fourth named requirement being "heretofore unmet".) You cannot get more insane than this except in magical la-la land where there are no trade-offs of any kind. It's absurd.