Nathan Baschez is the cofounder and CEO of AI word processor Lex. He cofounded Every, was the first employee at Substack, and co-created Product Hunt.
Trade-offs are your friend
You probably can't have your cake and eat it too. But that's just fine.
Dec 31, 2019 · 7 min readUpdated Jul 10, 2026
This is part of an ongoing series exploring the work of Michael Porter—the HBS professor widely seen as the father of modern strategy. It’s about how to use trade-offs to prevent competitors from copying you, and about how to know when you should (and shouldn’t) copy your competitors.
Enjoy!
One day, Herb Kelleher walked into his office and found a package from his customer service team. It was a bundle of angry letters from a customer with a note attached: “this one’s yours.”
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