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Paul Buchheit on why focus is your most powerful weapon versus large companies

October 13, 2023

Paul Buchheit is the creator of gmail. In the clip below, he argues:

“As a startup, focus is your most powerful weapon. The reason you’re able to take on these big companies is because they’re doing 1,000 different things. The only way you can win is if you take everything you have and focus it at one point.”

He believes focus is why Google won at search: “that was all we were focused on early on, whereas everyone else was like ‘oh, we want to be a portal.’”

In addition to focus, Paul Graham highlights other advantages startups have over large incumbents in his essay How to Make Wealth:

”A big company is like a giant galley driven by a thousand rowers. Two things keep the speed of the galley down. One is that individual rowers don't see any result from working harder. The other is that, in a group of a thousand people, the average rower is likely to be pretty average.

If you took ten people at random out of the big galley and put them in a boat by themselves, they could probably go faster. They would have both carrot and stick to motivate them. An energetic rower would be encouraged by the thought that he could have a visible effect on the speed of the boat. And if someone was lazy, the others would be more likely to notice and complain.

But the real advantage of the ten-man boat shows when you take the ten best rowers out of the big galley and put them in a boat together. They will have all the extra motivation that comes from being in a small group. But more importantly, by selecting that small a group you can get the best rowers. Each one will be in the top 1%. It's a much better deal for them to average their work together with a small group of their peers than to average it with everyone.

That's the real point of startups. Ideally, you are getting together with a group of other people who also want to work a lot harder, and get paid a lot more, than they would in a big company”