Ubiquity 6 co-founder Anjney Midha argues early-stage founders should quit their day jobs to go full-time, not split focus. A crowded problem space signals market relevance, not weakness, but timing matters for product-market fit. Study competitors' public roadmaps and focus on what you can execute faster.
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And I think it's pretty common actually in the Bay Area for some reason for people to think like, you know what, I'm gonna keep my day job and I'm gonna do this as a nighttime thing. And I just, I've never understood that because I think you end up not doing justice to yourself, your co-founder, your customers, to anybody really. You end up half-assing kind of both things. So I ended up quitting my job as an investor and going full-time on Ubiquiti 6. Does anyone have any questions? I think there was one somewhere over there. Yes, you had a question.
Hello. So you mentioned that you started by solving a problem which has not been solved in the world, right?
Right.
During the stage when you were trying to solve the problem, how can you be sure that there is no one else who is trying to do the same as you're doing?
So that's a good question. I think that—
I mean, it's not up there in Google, but there might be some people working on labs or anywhere, right?
So it's actually the opposite. I think, in fact, it's quite easy— it's common— it's a common pattern of thinking to assume you should be solving a problem that nobody else is solving. And I actually believe the opposite, which is that if you're working on a problem, if the problem that you're thinking about is valuable, it's probably a good sign that other people are thinking about the same thing too. Especially in a cutting-edge— in a space with emerging technology, one of the biggest mistakes that you can make is being too early. Timing is really, really important because you might get the product right and the team right and the investors right, but if you're too early and the market just isn't ready for you, you will fail. And there's countless examples of people saying like, oh, we built that thing before Instagram did or before Snapchat did. They just got lucky. And that is really true. There were a ton of companies that actually were working on different versions of Instagram or Snapchat and consumer companies before, but the reason those folks ended up capturing the bulk of value in those markets had to do with timing.
Yeah.
And I think what you wanna ask is, are the other people working on it any good? So it's actually, to answer your question, you don't actually know that other people aren't working on it, and I would argue that if, you look around and there's nobody else thinking about this problem and thinking about solving it, you should make sure you have a good understanding of why that is. And if the reason is it might be too early, then you should think again about whether it's the right time to solve that problem.
All right.
I have a second question. So you started being a developer, right?
Right.
And then you thought of being the founder. started being the founder, were you like taking 2 roles? So like the developer and the founder of the business, your own startup?
By developer, do you mean investor?
Yeah.
Ah, no. So I think one of the things that is really hard to do at the earliest stages of being a startup is to not be And I think it's pretty common actually in the Bay Area for some reason for people to think like, you know what, I'm going to keep my day job and I'm going to do this as a nighttime thing. And I just, I've never understood that because I think you end up not doing justice to yourself, your co-founder, your customers, to anybody really. You end up half-assing kind of both things. So I ended up quitting my job as an investor and going full-time on Ubiquiti 6.
Thank you.
Yeah.
You mentioned that entrepreneurs should list the things that would make their competitors successful, and then they— from the list, they choose the things that they can do faster.
Right.
How would you tell what are the things that your competitors need to succeed in this competition?
Ah, so how do you— I think that's a good— it's an art, but it comes from knowing your space really well, right? So what you gotta do is go really deep on your space, understand what the challenges are in that space. And then if you have a pretty good insight of and an understanding of how that industry works, it's actually not that hard often to put yourself in the shoes of, let's say, a CEO or a founder. who has a 300, 400 person team at their disposal and ask, if I was them, what do I have to achieve? What does my job depend on for us to achieve in the next 2 to 3 years? Often it's also really easy to just go Google these people and they're quite public about what their roadmaps are because they need to tell their users and their audiences what they're gonna build. So in our case, We were pretty focused on understanding, hey, the biggest companies that are invested in the success of AR, right? Whether that's smartphone folks or gamers or game engine companies or platform companies, let's go down the list and ask what do they have to build to be successful? Sometimes I would just be like, I don't know what this person's thinking. Let me go understand based on what they've said publicly. And it's shocking how much public information people put on the internet. So a lot of our companies have just put their roadmaps up in blog posts, in speaker sessions like this, on YouTube. And then I think it's actually a matter of you being a good strategist to figure out if this is all the things they're going to say, what are the— all the things that they're saying, sorry, that they're going to build, what are the 20 or 30% of things that they probably won't end up doing? But what are the like 70 to 80% of things that they have to build. I find if you're quite clear about who your competitors are, it's not that hard to figure out what they're going to do. Then it's more important to argue— to figure out what you are going to be able to do faster than them. And that, it's really important to not miscalculate on.
Yeah, the exposure that the competitors have is different than the exposure that I have as an entrepreneur or as an early entrepreneur.
Right.
So do you think that the blog posts or the YouTube videos of these entrepreneurs or founders would be enough to understand what they're lacking?
It depends on the stages that your competitors are, but the bigger these companies get, often you have the same information that a lot of the key decision makers within that company have. So because what happens is, as companies scale, Right? They're trying to solve a really difficult communications problem, which is to align their entire company with clarity. And the way most companies end up doing that is by distilling what their most important priorities are and then constantly repeating those things in press, in news articles, in internal strategy documents. If it's publicly traded companies, they're actually trying to communicate those priorities to their shareholders. So you actually have a unique information advantage at your fingertips, which is the internet. This is different if you're competing in a really small space or early space where your competitors are private, not well known. Then your best bet is actually to build relationships with folks in the industry, take them out to dinner, and ask them, hey, what do you know that I don't know?
