in Business, Product

How Many Clone Startups Do We Need?

Why is the world obsessed with building so many similar products and companies, is it that many VCs are just sheep and throw money at startups in a large and growing market? Or is it that the world needs variety? current solutions are not serving the market well? the market is big and more companies can co-exist and thrive?

For example, I don’t work in the Cloud, Data or Monitoring space and I don’t spend much time thinking about this space but I have seen many companies popping up that are all doing variations of Cloud Backups, Cloud Log Analyzers. I can only imagine how many companies actually exist in each of these areas, I am probably only aware of a small percentage of them.

I see this happening in many industries, not just cloud computing. I see this even in Transportation (Lyft, Uber, Didi, Ola and on and on), Hospitality (Airbnb, Sonder, Lyric, Vrbo, Vacasa, Holidu and on and on), Streaming (Disney+, Peacock, Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu and on and on). I understand variety is the spice of life but I also know the “paradox of choice”.

The fundamental question I’m intrigued by is “why do people spend so much money, time and effort on building things that are not unique”, that are not, in my humble opinion, zero to one companies.