Entrepreneurship for Engineers: Painkiller or Vitamin?
Summary
“Why would someone prefer to be a painkiller in a very competitive market with seven competitors doing the same thing and no barriers to entry versus, being a vitamin with a unique value proposition and a strong moat around it?” asked Guillem Sague, partner at Nauta Capital. In making investment decisions, he said, he looks at whether a company’s product is more vitamin or painkiller, though it is just one of a large array of information he considers. Chip Ernst, former vice president of sales at SpeedDB and current co-founder at a stealth startup, told The New Stack that he can easily imagine a successful product that is all painkiller — maybe one that helps you recover from a ransomware attack, for example. For example, a cybersecurity product might look an awful lot like a vitamin: it is preventative, allowing the company to follow best practices, but not really killing any immediate pain. Successful technologies can become a core part of people’s professional identities: There are armies of Salesforce specialists whose whole career is tied to one company’s platform.