Right. But the reason big companies fail at this is because they don’t have the balls to pursue optimal longterm strategy in the face of quicker near term wins. There’s nothing preventing a big company from thinking like a nimble startup, other than fear/lack of vision coming from the top. If the CEO stuck to his or her guns, they could outcompete startups for these opportunities.
Great advice for a YC startup, but not how big companies that already have large user bases operate. Big companies have a metric they want to drive, then look for big opportunities, simply because dominating a “niche” is too small an opportunity to make a dent in a big-company metric like DAU, time spent, etc. If you do want to start with a niche, it can be super hard to justify continued investment from management, given that there are so many other bets that can drive larger near-term changes to metrics.