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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.