Survive the AI Knife Fight: Building Products That Win — Brian Balfour, Reforge

Industry Landscape & Challenges - The tech industry is experiencing intense competition with rapid product launches and well-funded startups across various software categories [1] - Companies are collapsing in months rather than years due to the competitive pressure [1] - Foundational shifts in technology are happening on a monthly basis [4] - The key question for companies is "What do I build and why will it win?" [1] AI Product Strategy - Companies should treat AI like a series of Lego blocks, assembling differentiated AI features and products by integrating available AI capabilities with their data and functionality [12] - Competitive advantage comes from unique data, functionality, and understanding of unmet customer needs, not the AI itself [13] - Data provides context to the AI model to generate a unique output, with uniqueness stemming from real-time, user-specific, domain-specific, and human judgment data [16][17] - Functionality determines how the AI behaves and gives the AI product superpowers through specialized workflows, unique algorithms, business rules, and integrations [18] Granola Case Study - Granola, an AI notetaker, gained 40% market attention and $50 million in funding by focusing on helping users take better notes rather than replacing the entire note-taking process [21][22][24] - Granola assembled Lego blocks by using off-the-shelf AI capabilities (Deepgram for transcription, Anthropic and OpenAI for other functionalities) and combining user notes with transcriptions to enhance notes [25][26]