Surviving Competition

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Duration: 7:15
Source: Stanford ECorner
Author: Jeff Housenbold, Shutterfly
Copyright: Creative Commons: by-nc-nd
Found: Nov 5, 2009

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How do you continue to innovate and make sure that you have a sustainable business model as competitors are trying to encroach? And let me apply that in a Shutterfly context and then maybe bring in some other experiences. There are very few businesses that are inherently unique and have sustainable competitive advantage. Over time, things become imitable. People copy it. Toyota figures out how to make a better car than General Motors. Google figures out how to make a better search engine than AltaVista. Right. Things change over time. And I think great businesses and success, and then I’ll talk about how we're doing at Shutterfly, is figure out what you're good at, figure out where you can make money, and focus. And so too often, I've been in companies or invested in companies where they try to be everything to everybody. In fact, I think part of what created eBay's slow down was we just kept putting feature after feature after feature onto the main eBay website. There were some people who wanted to do auctions and they tended to be more male. There are people who wanted to do fixed price, buy it now. Some people want to buy in quantities. Some people wanted different experiences and buyer, sellers and we just kept putting it on to the platform making it more and more and more complex. And the time to produce new innovations got longer and longer and longer because the code base got larger and larger in a key way and the UE and the complexity of it. And so when I first came to Shutterfly, we didn't really have points of differentiation. We didn't have a mission. We didn't have a vision. We didn't have a strategy. We didn't have the right management team. We didn't have the right corporate governance. What we had was a bunch of passionate people with the kernel of the right idea that needed to change the perceptual map from being a four-by-six company, which you can't necessarily win against Wal-Mart over time with their scale, and change that percep...
Language: English
Category: Business
Tags: Jeff Housenbold, Shutterfly
Country: United States


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