It's common knowledge in Silicon Valley that you have to be first out with a new product or service in order to enjoy the "first-mover advantage" that lets early birds catch the worm and the dominant market share. This advantage typically leads entrepreneurs to act with haste to be first to market or be forever doomed to a minor role in their niche.

 

Steve Blank , author, professor and serial entrepreneur (he was part of eight startups in over 21 years, the last one was E.piphany, a CRM company) disagrees with this common adage. He says it's "simply not true." Blank attributes the popularity of this phrase to a paper, "First Mover Advantages," written by Stanford Business School Professor David Montgomery and his co-author Marvin Lieberman published in the Strategic Management Journal in the summer of 1988.