The Only Success that Matters: This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade discuss the figurative moats that protect companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google from competition. Has anybody really figured out how to disrupt their markets? Why isn’t Postlight jumping on machine learning and blockchain? This episode is about companies zeroing in on their own strengths and focusing on their right-sized ideas.

Paul — 3:10:“How do you function and thrive in a world where you know you’re never going to be the biggest? Where there are giant organizations with giant competitive moats around them and yet the whole narrative is like, ‘this is the only success that matters.’”

Paul — 6:10:“Starbucks at one point was making little coffee shops that were not Starbucks but were really cool and looked local. They wanted to just make sure they had a place to test out ideas and they wanted to make sure they were getting that market.”

Paul — 7:40:“It’s so hard for the legacy company to catch up.”

Rich — 8:10:“I think the way you disrupt is you eliminate steps. There was a day when you’d have to sign on to the internet with some internet provider. There was a day when you weren’t on the internet and when you wanted to get on the internet you dialed a number… Then you’d open your browser, and you’d go to Google.com, then you go into the search box and search. Google decided to come out with a browser. I couldn’t get it. Firefox was killer. It was excellent at that point in time… It turns out the only reason they were doing it was to eliminate one of the steps. The search bar and the URL bar became one.”

Paul — 11:40:“Organisms at this size are vulnerable in a very sort of macro way. They’re vulnerable to economic shifts, technological disruptions, and cultural shifts. They’re not vulnerable to somebody else [doing] something 4% better, because then they’ll just buy them. Maybe global warming will destroy Google.”

Rich — 16:30:“It’s funny, right? These monsters are competing with each other. They’re paranoid about each other. We started this with the moat. I mean there’s the moat between Starbucks and Pete’s Coffee — those are little moats compared to what’s going on [between Amazon and Google], so how the hell do you get in?”

Paul — 17:30:“What we did is we made a decision to just focus on being a good company that puts nice things in your hand, and build solid platforms.”

Paul — 19:16:“The giant tech companies, because they have such loud voices in the room, they get the press, they get to define the web and they define mobile… They eat up all that oxygen and they define success entirely for the vast majority of human beings.”

Rich — 25:15:“That’s the tone of this. Just keep your chin up. Don’t ask if [you’re] going to be the next Facebook. Who wants to be Facebook?”

Paul — 25:30:“When you are in this world and you listen and you pay attention to the media, you feel like an idiot if you don’t have a trillion-dollar opportunity.”

LINKS

• Lily Tomlin — This is a Recording
• Slack
• Tensor Processing Unit
• TensorFlow
• Google Brain
• Stealth Starbucks

Track Changes is the weekly technology and culture podcast from Postlight, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. Production, show notes and transcripts by EDITAUDIO. Podcast logo and design by Will Denton of Postlight.

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