The Founder's Dilemma: To Compete or Unbundle | Andreessen Horowitz

It’s hard to compete with big social networks head-on these days. The network effects of those giant social networks are so strong, a straight-on challenge seems, well, challenging. But there is lots of opportunity to focus on one user niche or one specific form factor.

Right, it’s similar in fashion. Poshmark and RealReal basically have fashion-specific search granularity that makes them a better shopping experience than buying clothes on Mercari or eBay.

Vertical service marketplaces can optimize around one or a few adjacent verticals, but the low frequency of most verticals (other than cleaning and lawn care) creates challenges.

But I think it’s equally interesting to look at communities of professionals in design, engineering, etc. I think those professional groups can ultimately look like social communities, as well as labor marketplaces

He has a point: if your new social thing just recreates the same status hierarchy, it won’t work. Instead, by asking people to make a new kind of content (talk audio, or TikTok dances, etc), you rearrange the status hierarchy so a new class of creators can succeed

My conjecture around personal fitness is that maybe not enough people like to talk about it. Personal nutrition and weight gain/loss end up being private topics, rather than ones you’d typically share with strangers

To your point, I think if you’re building a vertical social network, you need verticals that are inherently social—that people like to talk about. Otherwise, it’s too hard to force connections and conversation around it

User-generated content offers a promising solution for cost-effectively scaling content production. Platforms such as YouTube and Twitch have assembled vast content libraries faster and more efficiently than any professional studio. YouTube serves over 1 billion hours of video daily via a community of 31 million channel creators. Twitch’s 6 million... See more