PG on Beating the Averages
In fact we did have a secret weapon, but it was simpler than they realized. No one was leaking news of their features to us.
He is referring to dev stack they chose in mid-90's. They were building the first ever web-based platform for user-created eCommerce sites (the original Shopify).
Lisp was their server langaguage of choice (despite being relatively obscure and not used my any of their contemoraries). By taking a calculated risk with their stack, they found:
We were just able to develop software faster than anyone thought possible.
This was an enormous competitive advantage for a product company.
... if you have a choice of several languages, it is, all other things being equal, a mistake to program in anything but the most powerful one.
In modern web the language is predetermined: javascript. However the framework or stack is very fluid and highly variable. MEAN, Rails, MeteorJS, ember-cli, etc.
For gather the best intelligence on competitors: read their job listings.