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. In fact, the best companies never talk about the competition. They just talk about the fact that they're different than everybody else. I'll give you an example from Doordash days. Very competitive space, right? You can think of Doordash as being no different than anybody else, or they have to figure out how to be different. So it's a three sided marketplace. There's drivers, there's consumers, and there's merchants or restaurants. In the very beginning, they focus on selection, which is not what every restaurant delivery company focused on. They just try to be different in a dimension that they believe will end up making them better because the consumer wanted selection. You and I might individually only order from three to five restaurants, and that's fine. But this group, three times 300 people, that's a lot of different restaurants. Yes, there's going to be overlap, but they believe that selection was going to be important. And so this is where I think founders have to come up with a novel and compelling insight into the industry that no one else has. And yes, everybody's going to move fast, but they're going to move fast in different directions.