7 Powers with Hamilton Helmer | Acquired Podcast

One of the unusual things about my book is I've always tried to be very careful to make sure that everything maps back to value. So if you said what is the fundamental assumption of this book, it's that strategy and value are mathematically – they’re duals. And so the mapping function from that desire to join the site versus actually being able to ... See more

…the path to establishing that kind of persistence is not linear, there's a step change. There's a period when a company can establish that, and that window often closes, if you will. It's the kind of business that you're so familiar with. It's in the earlier stage.

A distinction that I draw is if the value of the incumbent can actually be replaced by a technology product rather than a technology-enabled product.

…if somebody is several years ahead of you, and it's one of the middle phase types of power, which is most common in tech—network, economy scale, economy switching costs; those are the three most common ones—then your size matters. If they're ahead of you, when push comes to shove, when the market settles down, you will not be in a good position.

There are two necessary and sufficient conditions for power. There's a benefit. You've got to come up with something that's better than what other competitors do, but better for you as a business model.

A counter positioning occurs if a company comes up with a new business model and challenges often a powerful incumbent with it. But for the incumbent to mimic this model, they would incur (or at least think they would incur) so much immediate financial damage that they just say, I can't go there.They're very cognitively biased towards thinking that... See more