Archive: defensibility

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Startup Insider: Trade Secrets vs. Patents

By Early Investing on August 2, 2021

A key part of a startup’s success is its defensibility — how it protects itself from the competition. It’s not enough for a company to offer a high-quality product. It needs to provide something that’s valuable and different from anything else out there. And it needs to make sure no one else can do what it’s doing. So when they’re starting out, all founders must make a choice about their defensibility. Do…

Hardware Startups Have a Secret Strength

By Andy Gordon on March 3, 2021

Hardware is risky. Making something you can touch and feel usually takes more money and time than developing software products.  Yet five out of the last seven startups I recommended to my First Stage Investor members are hardware (or hybrid hardware and…

The Truth About Risk and Reward

By Andy Gordon on August 26, 2020

Whether you realize it or not, chances are you believe in the risk-reward trade-off. In its most basic form, it means the lower the risk, the lower the potential returns. And the higher the risk, the higher the potential returns. The basic idea sounds perfectly logical.