Alex Rampell

It's like you'll appreciate this if you're an enterprise SaaS guy.

Right.

It's like the best companies have hostages, not customers.

So if there's a company that has something marginally better than Workday.

right?

Workday has hostages.

They don't have customers.

They're not going to go be able to sell GE and say, oh, wow, I love you to YC kids.

I'm totally switching my HRIS from shitty Workday to amazing AI, whatever, YC, Silicon Valley, HRIS.

Never going to happen.

But if the rate of new company creation is high enough, those new companies will pick the best product.

And they're like, oh, well, I could use Workday, but I'm not a hostage.

So I'm free.

I'm going to pick this other thing.

I was the first investor in Mercury, the SMB bank.

And until SVB failed, they never stole a customer from SVB.

But if you're a brand, as long as the rate of new company creation is high enough, you can play this game that I called Greenfield Bingo, where it's just like you pick every software category, you build a better version of that, and then you've got a shot.

And that's what Stripe was.

I mean, that's why it worked.

If the rate of company creation is very low, like if I build a better EHR, like electronic health records company, it's just not going to work because the rate of new hospital creation is too slow.