Catching Cats VS Catching Mice
Written on 29th April 2009
1 COMMENT 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
My cat is pretty quick but I am smarter so I can catch it if I want. My cat can also catch mice. I’m not sure if mice are dumber or smarter than cats but they CAN be caught by cats. But I can’t catch a mouse with my bare hands. They are simply too fast for me.
I can catch my cat and my cat can catch a mouse but I can’t catch mice.
Are you following me? This makes sense, right?
But it doesn’t make sense to big companies. They figure:
‘We have enough money to buy this little start-up that offers this solution to this problem so we sure as hell can just build this solution ourselves and save us the trouble and money of buying it’
But the ‘Buy or Build’ decision is slightly more complicated than that. The fact that you can buy a company doesn’t mean you can also build what they can build.
Being a cat catcher doesn’t make you good at catching mice.
Scale DOES matter.
More mental ammunition for you if you ever find yourself negotiating with a big company.
But wait! It also works the other way around! Catching a mouse or catching 100.000 mice is not the same. When you catch one mouse you are dealing with one mouse. If you are catching 100.000 mice you are dealing with mousecatchers. Herding mice or herding mousecatchers are two very different things.
But you knew this.
Maybe you didn’t know this: cats don’t play with mice for fun, practice or out of ignorance. They play with mice because the terror of being eaten alive by a cat makes the mouse’s meat taste sweeter. Apply that to the cat & mouse games that are played during negotiations and you can figure out what I could blog about that.
Previously published here.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
