(electronic glissando)
- Sometimes you just really nail that idea.
It's something everyone wants. It's clearly the future.
- The user can control their Hooli phone
solely with their neural impulses.
Point, click, drag, even type,
all using only brainwaves.
Think it,
and it happens.
(electronic beeping)
- Holy shit.
Seriously?
- Seriously.
- This is great!
Fuck yes, team!
So, what's our timeline here?
I mean, when can we start testing this?
How long before we can integrate this into Nucleus?
- Not long.
It'll probably happen in our lifetime,
we just have to figure out how to make it work.
But I really believe that our grandchildren
are going to grow up taking this technology for granted.
- Our grandchildren?
- I know you're single, but you might meet someone.
- No, no.
- It's not enough.
Getting pointed in the right direction is just not enough.
As you saw in that clip right there,
Big Head in "Silicon Valley" found this out the hard way.
You can't just point at the moon,
you've got to build the goddamn spaceship.
(rocket sounds)
You've got to figure out the problem to solve,
and in that step the questions you ask are:
Who am I building for?
Who's my audience?
What problem do they have?
And then next, you've got to figure out how you'll solve it.
Is my solution possible?
Is it feasible?
How much will it cost?
What tech today exists and how much of it can I use?
Is it open-source?
Is it licensable?
Is there research out there that's already been published,
that's a new method?
And what are the alternatives?
How do people solve it today?
Who else has tried this?
And what's gone wrong with that solution?
Why now?
What do I have that nobody else has?
Is it technology?
Is it something that would prevent other people
from just copying it?
The best moat of all
is often actually real pure technology.
Sometimes it's relationships to customers,
for instance, if you're selling to an enterprise
and you can close an extra good, initial lighthouse customer
that would unlock an entire industry.
Envoy, the sign in, check in service
that you've probably already used in Silicon Valley,
they got started by selling Airbnb
in their first 10 clients.
Is it a better go-to-market?
Is there content?
Is there some relationship?
Is there something that you do that nobody else does?
What is that?
That's a great place to start because that helps you
make something that is a lot more protect-able.
The difficult thing after doing this exercise
is sometimes there isn't a sufficient answer.
There might be too many nos,
there might be too many weak spots in your pitch.
Some basic examples? The audience might be too small,
your problem might not be felt severely enough
for someone to try to fix it,
it might not be possible to build what you want,
given the state of technology today.
Or it might be possible but it might be too expensive
to make it viable for the people who might pay for it.
There might be obvious alternatives that are basically
just as good or even cheaper.
There might be ways that it's being solved today
that are basically fine.
You might have no advantages over other people
trying to create this.
And this might be the moment of maximum disillusionment.
That's the time when people start thinking,
"Maybe I shouldn't work on it."
On the other hand, this set of questions
helps you think about the questions you need to answer.
This focuses you on the things that you need to work on
as a founder.
And if you're a great engineer, that's why building tech
can be some of the best ways to do that.
You can find a moat, a reason to be
that might make it a lot better, cheaper, or faster
than all the alternatives.
If you're a technologist, being able to use technology
to be your moat is sort of the bread and butter, right?
The best examples are things that basically
have never happened before.
Standard Cognition is a great example of this
because they have a pure technology moat.
They're actually putting to practice a new method
that has never been commercialized before.
And as a result, they have something
that even Amazon cannot duplicate.
They can provide cashierless checkout for a price
that is 1/10 the cost,
possibly, 1/100 the cost of state of the art
that's out there right now.
But that's not the only way
for this to actually come together.
One example from my own past was Posterous actually.
Posterous, if you don't remember,
was a dead simple email platform
that let you email one email address, post@posterous.com
and this itself was a brand new thing
that nobody else had ever tried.
The main reason was that people thought that security wise
it wasn't possible to provide a good experience that way.
That's why people always had sort of
secretpassword123@flickr.com.
Posterous was doing, on day one,
a thing that people thought was not possible.
But we did it using pretty simple software.
It wasn't machine learning.
Frankly, it was IF statements.
If we received an email from you before,
we asked you to confirm it.
Once you confirmed it, we knew that that path of email
was going to be safe.
And that simple innovation
from my co-founder, Sachin Agarwal,
was enough to be a great moat for us.
Nobody else tried to copy us right off the bat
because they couldn't figure out
the thing that we had figured out.
That was enough for us to become a top 200 site
and do it in a way where we weren't sort of fending off
a thousand other copycats.
So, yeah, there's not just one way to get this moat.
What was true for us in 2008, remains true today.
Without that moat, without that reason to be,
without that thing that other people did not have,
we didn't have a good reason to exist.
We could take this technological limitation,
which is antispoof technology,
and use it to be enough of a moat to get our first
hundreds of thousands of users.
And that's a thing that you can do too.
Maybe not exactly that but that's the shape of something
that you should be looking for
when you're working on a new startup.
It's just prudent to ask:
Why me?
What do I have that nobody else has?
And if that answers nothing, you've got to keep working.
Thanks for watching.
(relaxing music)