Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…For those of us who've been in the collaboration space, and I've been doing collaboration and productivity apps for over 20 years, over two decades, at some point, you have companies like Microsoft that get really attracted to a space and you can see the trajectory of a business that's growing at a certain clip and then all of a sudden there's a competitive product that enters that has the might of distribution and the might of pricing, and that's just a direct example. I think I've seen that multiple times, first at Adobe where I was part of the document cloud business, clearly saw that at Box as well. I think you can, in general, sort of look at every single category and you can say that there was a category leader and they were growing at a certain clip or a certain pace and all of a sudden there were a bunch of entrants that get in and what happens to your growth rate? It's all dependent on how strong is the competitor in terms of providing a good enough solution? That's one. The second is how strong is the competition in terms of their distribution outreach? Then the third thing is how strong is the competition in terms of the pricing and packaging? I really like this discussion, especially because often the advice is, "Don't worry about the competition, just focus on the customer, it's going to be fine. " Which what you're saying is that's not right, and I agree. What do you do with that in mind? How does that impact the way you build product or strategy? Is there some you could share that maybe tactically someone could leverage to how they're approaching their product strategy? It depends on who the competition is and what is their unfair advantage here. We talked about one specific competitor and I have a lot of respect for them, by the way, and I learn a lot from them every single day in terms of how they make bets and how they enter markets and stuff. At some point I'm going to write a book on them, I feel.…

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