Hamilton Helmer

AI can create strategic power through data-driven network economies or high switching costs derived from deep personalization.

"Will AI models develop so that they learn in a way that for one user's interaction helps another user's interaction? That would be a powerful network economy. Or if it learns, if you think of if it le..."

A growth loop or flywheel only provides strategic power if its impact is material enough to significantly alter the company's economic returns.

"We laugh whenever we hear somebody say they have a flywheel, which gives you the idea of network economies. There are often flywheels, the ones that really are material, are rare. The key thing here i..."

Counter-positioning is the most common entry point for startups, leveraging a new business model that incumbents cannot easily mimic without damaging their existing business.

"Almost every startup that you want to deal with starts with counter positioning because remember what product market fit is primarily is a substitution. You are coming up with a way to satisfy a more..."

A durable product vision must identify both the value created (the benefit) and the structural reason competitors cannot copy it (the barrier).

"Power requires a benefit and a barrier, so he's taking care of the benefit part by saying a castle, you have to have a pretty good understanding of why it's a castle and not a shack."

Effective strategy focuses on the long-term fundamental determinants of business value, specifically the Net Present Value (NPV) of expected cash flow.

"Strategy is a long time concept. You're looking far out in the future... if you focus on value that narrows what you think about and allows you to get rather concise and offer up advice to founders ab..."

True competitive advantage is difficult to identify and requires a deep understanding of the underlying industry economics rather than surface-level observations.

"Understanding whether or not there is a type of power in place is hard... It comes down to the hard part is industry economics is what really are the economic relationships and it's very hard."

Data-based scale economies are often illusory because the competitive advantage diminishes once competitors reach a certain threshold of data.

"People often think that they get scale economies through data. And I'd say that that's possible, but it's rare. And the reason it's rare is not because there aren't scale economies in data, but rather..."

Operational excellence and user interface design are often mimicable and therefore do not constitute a durable competitive barrier (moat).

"Netflix in an earlier phase was fighting Blockbuster... If you look at the Blockbuster site, their UI site, you couldn't tell it different from Netflix. They just copied it. And so all that thoughtful..."

Strategic frameworks should serve as guideposts for action rather than substitutes for the actual work of building and shipping.

"Action is the first principle of business. You do stuff and my book is very oriented towards that. The idea was not to tell you what to do, but to give you guideposts while you're on that journey. Peo..."