A product is not a company

Building a good product is difficult. Building a company around it introduces an entirely different set of problems.

There is distribution, hiring, regulation, capital, culture, pricing, partnerships, and the quiet work of earning trust. None of these appear in the product demo, but any one of them can determine whether the product survives.

Technologists sometimes speak as if the quality of the product should settle everything. It rarely does.

A company is the system that allows a product to keep creating value under real conditions. The product may be the centre of that system, but it is never the whole of it.