Competitive Advantage

“Today, I would argue return on capital is less useful. As a touchstone for does a company have competitive advantage? Because if you don't have any capital and your denominator is nothing, it's pretty easy to generate a high ratio, right? It's just math. There…”

“All the other stuff that you hear about and people talk about around writing reports and Summarizing, that's all permission to play off the shelf stuff. There's no edge there. There's no competitive advantage in trying to think too deeply about any of those th…”

“So I think this is like a place where if you're interested in the technical details, you can have a competitive advantage, at least for the next year or two because capacity is really going to matter, right? You know, often from a product perspective, I like t…”

“Everything that people tell you is hard. Once you figure out how to do it, it's totally a competitive advantage.”

“If you have, if you can make it like a qualitatively different price profile, I think, you know, that's absolutely as much of a competitive advantage as product quality or anything like that.”

“At the end of the day, your competitive advantage will always come from your ability to measure more than your competitors, because then suddenly you're gonna do that.”

“One of the things that I've observed in some of our best companies is the thing that the founders think is going to be the competitive advantage at the start actually turns out to be the competitive advantage only for a short period of time, but that allows th…”

“The best product doesn't always win, and product is not a long-term competitive advantage.”

“Companies need a sustainable, competitive advantage that is independent of their variable marketing campaigns. You can't win a fight with a measuring tape.”

“As we think about mode frameworks, how to think about competitive advantage, that's another field of compounding knowledge. If you can build patterns around it, that's more evergreen, that's more scalable, and you can apply it to multiple judgment calls.”

“The business that's growing at above average rate without competitive advantage, that's really just momentum.”

“Many times being open is much better than being closed, because what gives you your competitive advantage is not your hidden secret thing. It's the fact that you're in motion with a great team.”

“We are not trying to accurately nail down what a company's competitive advantage is or will be. Actually, if you look at the reports we write, the analysis that we do on competitive advantage, it looks more like a meditative, meditative essay than a set of ass…”

“We began to wrestle with that whole idea of what is important with a competitive advantage, and part of that was it wasn't about the absolute size, it was about the direction of that competitive advantage.”

“And so we argue that a competitive advantage should have two features. One is an absolute one. One is a relative one. The absolute one is you should have returns today or returns that are promised to be above your cost of capital, right?”

“I'm single, and that's a competitive advantage too.”

“And the truth is like, those are nice things to have and they'll help you get a headstart for a couple of months or maybe a year or two, but those are not sustainable competitive advantages. Like you can't outwork every company in the world forever.”

“And what we learned because of our mistakes of significantly underperforming the market is you've got to stay focused on the direction of the competitive advantage because everybody's business, I don't care who it is, every organization, you're either getting …”

“You don't want to pay for you know, huge amount of competitive advantage. In an industry where there's a ton of entry and exit, where market shares are very volatile, and by contrast, you might be much more willing to pay for franchise value for an industry w…”