Sequoia’s Alfred Lin explains why your startup should focus on being different rather than “better”

“I’ve learned over time that you need to have differentiation. A lot of storytelling is about differentiation. Why are you different than anybody else? You don’t want to compete head-to-head. You want to tell the story about why your company is unique. I think sometimes we forget that. We just talk about why we’re better than the competition.”

Alfred continues:

“In fact, the best companies never talk about the competition. They just talk about the fact that they’re different than everybody else.”

He gives DoorDash as an example. When DoorDash started out, there was lots of competition and they had to figure out how to be different. As a three-sided marketplace (drivers, consumers, and merchants), there were several attributes they could choose to focus on. They focused on selection, which wasn’t what every restaurant delivery company focused on:

“They just tried to be different in a dimension that they believed would end up making them better because the consumer wanted selection… This is where I think founders have to come up with a novel and compelling insight into the industry that no one else has. Everybody’s going to move fast, but they’re going to move fast in different directions.”

Full video: South Park Commons “-1 to Alfred Lin, from building Zappos to investing at Sequoia“ (Nov 2023)