[nostrademons]

Startups are a "winner's game", in that the default state is just dead, and if you play without errors you will still end up dead. You have to have some winning move that nobody has thought of before; otherwise, why wouldn't this business already exist? Big companies get to play a loser's game: if they just avoid mistakes, they can continue making obscene profits, because they've figured out a business model that works.

The "winner/loser's game" framing is still relevant. A startup is focusing intently on its one winning move and trying to hit it out of the park. A big company only needs to avoid losing moves, and so it often has resources and attention available that it can spend on commoditizing complements.

[blacktriangle]

Startup's are a winners game, but the software aspect of them is very much a losers game. Startup's very very rarely succeed because of high quality programming, most of them are doing very boring things from a software point of view, they just need to not have their software be unusable for long enough to test out their business hypothesis.

[nostrademons]

Depends on era, sub-industry, and to some extent location.

I think that's been largely true of startups that have succeeded since 2004, particularly the latest crop of SF-based startups. These have largely been about the deployment of existing technologies developed at big companies (the WWW, e-commerce, and mobile phones) into new industries.

But I had a mentor, back when I started my career in Boston, that said "Every startup I've seen succeed did so because some engineer did something that everybody else said was impossible." She was an early engineer and later VP at Stratus (the early-80s company that made super-redundant minicomputers for banks etc.), then later was called in to rescue Equalogic's software (multi-terabyte transactional SANs) before it was bought by Dell. There are plenty of other startups that succeeded because they did something technologically that most people thought was impossible or at least economically inadvisable - Google, VMWare, SpaceX, etc.