Hi Reader,
"Surprisingly, currently Amazon is rebuilding or cloning what we are building."
This is a quote Cyril Golub, CEO of Jinnify, shared in the interview I had with him. A fear many founders of software companies have, for good reasons. It happens - and will continue to happen more easily. So that question is: how to avoid it? And that's what I explored with him in this week's podcast.
About Cyril: He started his first company in 2003, building e-commerce solutions. It became aheadWorks. He ran it for 16 years and sold it in 2019. After the exit, he spent roughly six years angel investing in more than 20 companies. Being a board member and, later on, CEO of CopyMonkey taught him what an AI-native company is and isn't. He took over the CEO seat at Jinnify in 2024, where he's now applying all his experience and learnings.
Here are the first principles he uses to guide his business:
- He'd rather be wrong with his hands on the wheel
Cyril had four or five write-offs in his investment portfolio. As an angel, you don't get to touch the business — you help when you're asked, you speak when it's convenient. He watched companies he'd put his own money into go down while his hands were tied. And every time he wondered what he'd have done in their seat. That's why he became CEO again.
- He didn't study his biggest competitor's product, but how they make money
Every competitor earns its money somewhere specific. And wherever that is, there are things they can't do without putting it at risk — no matter how good their engineers are. Cyril found Amazon's. Amazon earns from the ads sellers buy, so the more sellers bidding against each other, the better. Helping one of them win ends the bidding. Amazon is never going to build that. Cyril went and built it.
- He binned his own best work
Most of us build the new thing on the shape of the old one, because it feels safe. Cyril did it too — he gave every role in his company an AI agent, four people and four agents, and it worked well enough. Three months in, he threw it out. His words: 'We are just inventing the chariot with a more powerful horse instead of creating something new, the automobile.’
Here's the full interview with Cyril.
Question to reflect upon:
Where does your biggest competitor make its money — and what does that stop them from ever building?
The Remarkable Effect is when being copied costs you nothing.
Ton