> Since startups make the best stuff, they're strongest on level playing fields. They're weakest in markets dominated by companies you'd describe as mafia. Record labels are mafia. PBMs are mafia. In these worlds you don't win by having the best product. Indeed you may only even exist for as long as the mafia chooses to allow you to. Which is not to say they can't be defeated. They probably can be, but you'd have to do it by coming in from the side — by somehow making them irrelevant, rather than by frontal attack. Then you wouldn't depend on beating them to succeed; it would be an ancillary benefit of winning in another dimension.

I think this is the strongest point being made here. It so accurately describes the situation in every category of software that it almost makes the rest of the post obsolete advice.