Choosing what not to build is the new software moat

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 49:16

   unconvinced that it's worth it for a long time until they try and it doesn't work. Totally. I mean, so I'm actually, I'm not that bullish on like, everyone's going to build their own stuff. Like they're curious, they will, but it kind of, it actually kind of applies to like businesses, but also to humans to some degree, which is like for businesses, they need to refocus on what is our core competency? Like what makes us a particularly good business and what makes us better than others? And like for some of those businesses, it's probably not like having, like building their own coding agents right like you probably don't need if you're like a consumer like a cpg company you probably don't need to build your own internal coding agents you could probably get it from somewhere else um i think similarly like you know if in turn like whatever

2. 49:57

   in your day-to-day life you have some like problem that a bunch of other people have you probably don't need to spend your time building your own thing there's probably someone who's thought about it to an even higher scale of ambition that you have time for and they can solve it for you and then you can focus on like whether as an individual as a company like what is the thing that you're particularly passionate about or you're particularly good at and have a right to win or a right to make something incredible um and i think that's a cool thing is like there's a lot of things that i do that are probably not a good use of my time and like we can like remove those and like maybe for some period of time people want to focus on this thing and this is the only thing they want their attention on i think that's a better world than the world where it's like

3. 50:33

   oh i build my own like i build my own phone and i build my own phone apps and i build my own app i have my own door dash and my own thing it's like i think that's too much i don't think we need to do that zooming back in to factory today um it seems like everything is moving so quickly i just had a friendly like conversation with a friend who's at a different coding company and he was saying that things are moving so fast it's actually hard to have the time to like step back and think broadly about directions yeah have you felt that totally and i think right now we're at a point where there's actually like there used to be a moat in software of we know how to build this and no one else does so like that's why we're gonna win that doesn't exist there is nothing that nobody else can build which is crazy but that means the biggest

4. 51:21

   differentiator is like being willing to say no and like deciding what are the things that we do build and make incredible and what are the things that might be passing fads but we say no to and that is like all the more important because like literally anyone can build anything like there is nothing that you cannot build right now which briefly people get excited like i'm gonna build everything myself apps for everything custom interfaces for everything but then quickly it's like wait a minute okay i need to focus and like what are the things that we're gonna be particularly good at and it's like that's not that new like this has always been the thing um and i think for us that's something that we spend a lot of time on is like making sure that we say no like i i tell people at factory that my love language is

5. 52:00

   saying no to things. Like I love when I hear people say no. And I love when I tell people no, because it means that we're doing the hard thing, which is like we can, in theory, do everything. The hard decisions are the ones where we're like, nope, we're not going to do that. Nope, we're not going to do that. And it's also sometimes good to over rotate on that side,