The hardest lesson I struggle with is the Pieter Thiel line "the something of somewhere is always the nothing of nowhere". It is easy to see something that can marginally be improved or copied to perfection but this does not give you automatically the customer base and history that made the original work as a business.
The parent slightly misquoted it and it really needs the context.
The Silicon Valley of Iowa, is actually the nothing of nowhere. He is saying that when you are using the name of the original place to claim yours is the new place, it's more likely what you've got is a nothing of nowhere (ie the new place really doesn't matter, thus you're attempting to borrow reputation in naming in the form of the Silicon Valley of country/city/location).
The same usually goes for products/services as well. The Uber of XYZ is most likely garbage if that's how you're identifying your service. We're building the Airbnb of lawnmowers. And so on. Thiel's quote is essentially about knock-offs, copying, derivatives and how effective (or not) that process tends to be.
Elaborated quote from Thiel (from seven or eight years ago; may be extracted from his book, Zero to One, in which case it probably actually dates back to the Stanford lectures he did):
"There are a few different problems with it, one is that it is not even clear why Silicon Valley works. It is a singular thing, it is one time, one place. It’s very hard to figure out what are the factors which drive it. Is it the fact that it has good weather? Is it the fact that you have this whole network effect of people and some very successful companies which have been built over years? Is it the unenforceability of non-compete agreements so that employees can leave from one company and go and work in another in the state of California?"
"And then I always think that once you have set out to copy something you have already put yourself in somewhat of an inferior position somehow. The something of somewhere is the nothing of nowhere. The Oxford of Iceland is not Oxford. So all these – Silicon Beach, Silicon Roundabout – these all sound like inferior knockoffs."
"You don’t want to start with an inferior derivative. The question always has to be, what is it that you can do that is better than elsewhere? In the London context, there is a sense that it is the most cosmopolitan city in Europe and that is probably the strength that London should be pushing towards. There has been a lot of interesting finance innovation in London and so that seems natural."
Another way of saying this would be "it is harder to copy something than it is to make something". For example try building a successful search engine today, to beat Google at their own game, you need to solve all this technical problems plus beat a heavily intrenched incumbent. You can point to something like duck duck go and sure they did find a successful niche of privacy aware people that want to "degoogle" their lives, but even this doesn't mean that you can just be DuckDuckGo yourself.
This doesn't always hold.. You might argue that google probably aspired to be a yahoo, but I agree itt's bad to market yourself as a konckoff of something else.
