More on Defensibility
After my last post on defensibility, I read David Crow’s post about the very same article. The links David gives at the end of his post are great reads.
The links, copied from David’s article are:
- How to Change the World: Defensibility
- Counterpoint: Patents and Defensibility
- Union Ventures – Defensibiltiy
- The era of the disposable startup?
- Concurrent Startup Idea Generation and the Pervasive Copycat Fallacy
As someone who has been through the patent filing process, has been involved in the legal process of defending IP (ugh), and as someone currently involved in a web startup, defensibility is definitely on my mind. Thinking about defensibility is is core part of strategy and, in my experience, is likely the very first question potential investors will ask about.
When answering a question about defensibility or competition, I think a crucial point you have to make is that while a) you are concerned with and have thought long and hard about the issue b) you know that there is no magic solution. You must constantly think, adapt, and improve strategy. Startups can do this with agility, but agility means nothing without good guidance.
Two good quotations from the above articles include:
When all the dust settles, the goal is to paint this picture:
- You’re street wise, so you know that you can’t depend on patents.
- You understand that very few companies are truly defensible for reasons other than because they either achieved critical mass or had a nine-month head start.
- You have domain expertise, connections, and what you’re doing is hard.
- You’re not the only team that can do this, but you’re in a better position than most.
- You believe that you can build a business better than anyone (a little cockiness is necessary for an entrepreneur to survive)
and:
The question when pursuing a new idea for a business isn’t “has someone else thought of this and how can we prevent that from happening?” but rather “how can we beat someone else who is thinking of this right now?”
Thanks for the links, David, it was good to read those articles again.
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