Paul Graham: How Startups Get Powerful
Making Startups Powerful
In this essay, Paul Graham shares a key heuristic from his office hours: ask what would make a company more powerful, not just more profitable. He explains how to gain power by owning the customer relationship, making money flow through you, creating network effects, going full stack, selling to early-stage customers, and being generous. He also warns against markets dominated by 'mafia' players like record labels and PBMs.
Being generous makes you more powerful. As Tim O'Reilly said, you should create more value than you capture. Many hard-headed business types would write this off as idealistic hippy stuff, but in fact this is the route to becoming really rich.