How much should a company orient its strategy around competitors?

Andy Rachleff · Mar 10, 2017

Competition doesn't matter; there is far more leverage in spending your time figuring out how to delight the customer than in reacting to competitors

Reacting to competition never gets you to be first, and you can't win from behind in technology; paranoia distracts from delighting the customer

Scope: applies to technology businesses

9:09 20VC: Wealthfront and Benchmark's Andy Rachleff on Why Delight Is The Greatest Form Of Virality, Why Competition Does Not Matter & What The Future Holds For Automated Personal Finance

Craig Courtemanche · Dec 4, 2023

The right way to view competition is to barely think about it and instead obsess over customers, betting that competitors won't serve them as well as you do

Like a racer, you either stare at rivals in the rearview mirror and lose or look at the finish line and win; listen to customers, do what's right, and you'll win

Scope: still thinks about competitors, just not often

65:49 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche

Immad Akhund · May 12, 2025

Being competitor-focused is dangerous and competition almost never determines outcomes; teams should justify work by customer need and long-term product vision, never by what a rival did.

Across startups since 2006 there was always a scarier, better-funded competitor and 99% of the time it didn't matter — failures came from bad markets and successes came from listening to customers and holding a long-term vision; and if you copy someone you copy their mistakes along with their successes.

Scope: he enforces this by not letting his team discuss competitors

29:07 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund

Jonathan Ross · Sep 29, 2025

Successful businesses focus on solving unsolved customer problems rather than competing or watching the bottom line

If you're competing you're doing it wrong; differentiation means solving a problem the customer can't solve any other way, and then they happily pay you and cash flow takes care of itself

50:26 20VC: OpenAI and Anthropic Will Build Their Own Chips | NVIDIA Will Be Worth $10TRN | How to Solve the Energy Required for AI... Nuclear | Why China is Behind the US in the Race for AGI with Jonathan Ross, Groq Founder

Maor Shlomo · Nov 24, 2025

Founders should ignore competitors and focus on building a great product and finding the right way to market it

The market is so large that each player is only capturing 10-20% of the category; in his first company 40% of his mind was occupied by competitors, which was wasted attention

Scope: still says go as fast as you can

55:00 20VC: Base44's Maor Shlomo on How Vibe Coding Will Kill SaaS and Salesforce | Why it is BS that Vibe Coding Platforms Do Not Have Defensibility and Bad Margins | Why He Worries About Google, Not Replit and Lovable | Why Long Anthropic, Not OpenAI?

Dominik Richter · Dec 1, 2023

It is extremely arrogant not to pay very close attention to competitors, including all other companies marketing to the same consumer, because competition is a constant source of innovation and inspiration

Thousands of smart people at those companies think daily about reaching customers and building technology; observing them is a big shortcut to your own experimentation and learning

47:36 20VC: HelloFresh CEO on Why When You Raise VC You Only Have Two Options, Why Your IPO Price is Irrelevant, Why Timing is So Important in Going Public & Why D2C is Not Dead with Dominik Richter

Harry Stebbings · Oct 28, 2024

Founders should be grateful for their competitors

56:48 20VC: Why SaaS is Dead | Why AI First Companies Will Win | We are in the Middle of a Cold War for AI Talent | Why Europe is F******* and We Need to Stop Whining with Daniel Khachab, Co-Founder @ Choco

Yamini Rangan · Mar 18, 2025

Salesforce is better than HubSpot at marketing, storytelling and creating the narrative, and the best competitors make you better

27:56 20VC: HubSpot CEO on Where Value Accrues in SaaS AI | How HubSpot Competes Against Salesforce | Why B2B Is Not a Winner Take All Market | How to Go From SMB to Enterprise an Win | How SEO Dying Changes HubSpot's Business with Yamini Rangan

Alexander Embiricos · Feb 21, 2026

Competitors getting better is net helpful to OpenAI because you can learn from their product ideas even when their models are closed

Product launches expose the ideas — e.g. Warp's framing of an agent working in the cloud and locally at the same time was inspiring; everyone in the space is converging on the same conclusions together

Scope: learning is at the product/ideas level, not the model level

27:04 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI

Des Traynor · Nov 15, 2023

Competition should be viewed with respect and, once you've launched, increasing comprehension — you must understand why they win, since it may be go-to-market excellence rather than product.

If you don't understand why customers pick them, you'll never explain why the market isn't paying attention to you despite your better product; and you can't listen to customers who are using your competitors.

Scope: comprehension matters most after you've shipped

70:25 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn

Shervin Pishevar · Jan 13, 2025

Uber's biggest failure of fierceness was against Lyft: Travis spent six months lobbying regulators that Lyft was illegal instead of shipping UberX immediately

In that six-month window Lyft took off and ended up with roughly 30% of the US market

Scope: Lyft never expanded globally

19:03 20VC: Shervin Pishevar on The Epic Uber War and What Really Happened in the Firing of Travis Kalanick | Raising $15BN to Win China | Why The Traditional Venture Capital Model is Dead | The Future of Quantum and How We Will Cure All Diseases in 10 Years

Jesse Zhang · Sep 19, 2025

Salesforce is the competitor he most respects, and dunking on the big incumbents is unfair because they face a genuinely different scale problem

They must build for enormous scale and have a really smart team on it; competition with them hasn't heated up because they attack the problem horizontally while Decagon starts vertically

34:12 20VC: Why 90% of Founders Build Startups Wrong | Why AI Growth Rates are Sustainable & Remote Work is BS and the AI Talent War | Competing with Brett Taylor and Sierra: Who Wins the Customer Service War with Jesse Zhang, Decagon

Matthew Steckman · Mar 23, 2026

The worst thing you can do in defense is believe you are better than everybody else; you must respect every competitor

Hubris is what gets you knocked on your ass; he sees his own role as providing a check against it on the leadership team

39:16 20VC: Inside Anduril's $20BN Army Contract & Why Anduril Must Go Public | Why 99% of Drone Companies Will Die | Why There is Never an Ethical Question of How Anduril Products are Used with Matthew Steckman, President @ Anduril

Linda Lian · Apr 1, 2021

CommonRoom's real competition is inertia, existing organizational habits and human nature — not other companies in the space.

What they are up against is organizational change: getting companies to service customers and build product in a community-first way; other companies sharing that mission are more allies than competitors, and the market is big enough for all of them if they succeed.

Scope: scoped to what CommonRoom is trying to do; says it is far too early for her to worry about any competitor, large or small

31:27 20VC: How To Deliver Feedback with Compassion and Clarity, WTF Are Values Really and How To Instill Them & Raising $50M+ From Index and Greylock but Remaining in Stealth for 12 Months with Linda Lian, Co-Founder & CEO @ CommonRoom

Lauren Schwartz · Oct 19, 2022

'Do nothing' — customer inertia — is often the main competitor and is very hard to compete with; losing to it means the rep failed to attach to a big enough business problem rather than that the pain didn't exist

Sellers often find a practitioner who wants the product for one project, then the project gets deprioritized — proving it wasn't the biggest business problem available to attach to

Scope: depends on which competitor you lost to

32:32 20 Sales: How To Structure The Interview Process for All Sales Reps, The Must-Ask Questions When Identifying Potential Sales Talent & The 3 Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Their First Reps with Lauren Schwartz, VP of Enterprise Sales @ Fivetran

Max Junestrand · Aug 15, 2025

The biggest competitor in legal AI is non-adoption rather than any rival company, and multiple massive businesses will be built in the space

Market penetration is still in the low single percentiles of what it can become, making it effectively a blue ocean

Scope: still wants to beat rivals and be biggest

70:33 20VC: 15 Term Sheets in 7 Days and Choosing Benchmark | Harvey vs Legora: Who Wins Legal and How to Play When You Have $600M Less Funding | Are AI Models Plateauing Today | Building a 9-9-6 Culture From Stockholm with Max Junestrand

Maor Shlomo · Nov 24, 2025

In a market where features are copied within weeks, the right strategy is to take big bets on things that are substantial to users and structurally hard to copy, and to treat everything else as a velocity and taste game

Small features like app suggestions were replicated within days, so only architectural bets create durable separation

32:10 20VC: Base44's Maor Shlomo on How Vibe Coding Will Kill SaaS and Salesforce | Why it is BS that Vibe Coding Platforms Do Not Have Defensibility and Bad Margins | Why He Worries About Google, Not Replit and Lovable | Why Long Anthropic, Not OpenAI?

Amjad Masad · Apr 25, 2026

Replit sets the roadmap that competitors copy, and the agentic coding revolution was kickstarted by Replit Agent in 2024

The only durable defense is innovation — staying several steps ahead of copycats

38:58 20Product: Replit CEO on Why Coding Models Are Plateauing | Why the SaaS Apocalypse is Justified: Will Incumbents Be Replaced? | Why IDEs Are Dead and Do PMs Survive the Next 3-5 Years with Amjad Masad

Tony Fadell · May 11, 2022

Constantly tracking competitor news, trade shows and press releases will drive a leader crazy

There is a new announcement every day; reading them all is unmanageable, so you should only keep ears open while staying anchored on your own differentiation

40:24 20 Product: iPhone Creator, Tony Fadell on Marketing Lessons Learned from Steve Jobs, What is Truly Great Product Marketing, How The Best Product Teams Do Post-Mortems and Product Reviews & Is Product Art or Science, Data or Gut?

Keith Rabois · Nov 27, 2023

The right way to view competition is to be aware of competitors but not obsess over them

50:58 20VC: Keith Rabois and Mike Shebat on Creating an Olympian Mindset to Work Ethic, Why First-Time Founders are Better Than Serial Entrepreneurs, Why Remote Work Does Not Work, Why the Best Founders Always Start in their Teens & Why Companies are Cults?

Aman Narang · Aug 21, 2024

About 80% of incumbent POS platform features didn't actually matter to restaurateurs; what mattered was the shift to digital and mobile ordering

What customers actually asked for — handling online orders instead of faxes — wasn't done well by incumbents, and building that quickly was in Toast's sweet spot even if buggy

Scope: as of Toast's early launch period

15:41 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast

Nick Frosst · Sep 1, 2025

Founders should take a middle ground on competitive awareness; in AI the failure mode is too much information, not too little, and obsessing over marginal benchmark movements distracts from what you're actually building and who you're helping

The AI discourse is inescapable and every other headline, so almost nobody in the industry suffers from underinformation; fixating on 0.2% benchmark gains pulls you off the ground truth of customer value

Scope: also warns against the opposite extreme of head-in-the-sand isolation

31:55 20VC: Cohere Founder on How Cohere Compete with OpenAI and Anthropic $BNs | Why Counties Should Fund Their Own Models & the Need for Model Sovereignty | How Sam Altman Has Done a Disservice to AI with Nick Frosst

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

The YC advice to ignore competitors is right for product development but wrong for marketing, where counter-positioning against incumbents is the better play

Nearly every space has large existing players; Ramp's counter-positioning against Brex was genius marketing

46:00 20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

Ramp won by making points a bad thing in the market's mind and reframing spend as software investment and savings, which let them riff against every Brex move

Counter-positioning takes a competitor's core positioning and turns the exact opposite into your strength

46:37 20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries

Alex Bouaziz · Oct 22, 2025

He welcomes competition fought through product and go-to-market but not litigious fights

He enjoys competing over who serves the customer better and rates his own product-building; the money and talent that flowed into the space make that fight interesting, but litigation is not his style

63:38 Product and gtm rivalry is fair game litigation is not

Zaria Parvez · Jan 19, 2024

Duolingo's real competitors are TikTok and other social platforms competing for attention, not language-learning apps like Babbel or Rosetta Stone

If people are on TikTok they aren't in the app doing their daily lesson, so the job is to take the daily lesson and push notification to TikTok and bring people back

6:14 The real competitor is attention not category rivals

Zach Perret · Oct 16, 2024

Self-competition is the right way to approach competition: care very little about what competitors do and instead be driven by the gap between how good you are and how good you could be.

Competitors' moves ruining your day isn't useful; falling short of your own potential is the real challenge worth reacting to.

40:44 Self competition gap between current and potential self not rivals drives improvement

Adam Mosseri · Jul 24, 2023

Meta isn't just a copy machine but is very good at optimizing, and it will adopt a format someone else pioneered when it believes that format will become an industry standard

Stories became an industry standard adopted by YouTube, Pinterest and Twitter; Meta's DNA is competitive and always worried the world will change faster than it does, so it takes risks that sometimes blow up

30:29 Adopting proven formats from competitors once validated is strategic optimization not mere copying

Adam Mosseri · Jul 24, 2023

To judge whether a competitor's or trend's innovation is sustainable, identify the fundamental human need it meets and whether that need will persist — if it can only be explained by a viral mechanic rather than meeting a need in a richer or different way, it isn't worth entering

Instagram has changed a lot but the underlying human needs have stayed the same, so needs are the durable signal

31:17 Durable competitor innovations meet a persistent human need viral mechanics alone dont

Des Traynor · Nov 15, 2023

Making a competitor the enemy only works if beating them is actually the right prize; otherwise you win and end up ruling over a graveyard

If Intercom merely beat Zendesk in Zendesk's current diminished state, that wouldn't be the full realization of what Intercom could be

71:12 Beating a diminished competitor is a hollow victory not worth orienting around

Jeff Jordan · Jan 16, 2023

Whether to match a well-funded competitor's spending is dictated by the capital environment; in today's environment a16z counsels companies to avoid needing to raise for as long as they sustainably can, whereas three years ago the advice was to spend

The pendulum has swung away from businesses that raised a big round and spend hard to drive growth

16:30 Matching competitor spend is dictated by the capital markets environment not a fixed rule

Geoff Charles · Dec 6, 2023

Incumbents are not a threat to Ramp; new entrants attacking a pointed problem in finance are the real competitive risk

No incumbent B2B spend management company comes close to Microsoft-level innovation and velocity, whereas new entrants find novel points of entry

35:54 Incumbents are not the threat focused new entrants are

Kyle Norton · May 30, 2025

Toast is the competitor most worth respecting, while competitors that trap SMB customers with lock-in, domain hostage-taking and fear-mongering deserve disregard

Toast has good product craft and GTM execution and treats customers respectfully; the others exploit small businesses that lack power

68:21 Respect execution driven competitors but disregard those exploiting customers through lock in

Akshay Kothari · Sep 18, 2024

When competitors go aggressive on go-to-market, you have no real choice but to compete on the same terms

At the end of the day you have to play the game that is being played on the field

28:02 Must match competitor aggressiveness on go to market spend

Akshay Kothari · Sep 18, 2024 · hedged

In boom times you should compete for contested customers rather than sit out, but without spending so much that you endanger the company

You want to capture more of the customers you and your competitors are both chasing, without boning your company down

28:22 Compete for contested customers in boom times without endangering the company

Reid Hoffman · Jun 10, 2024

At least some competition is essential for companies, because very few pull themselves into coherent focused shape without it.

Google invented and published the transformer but left it as a bouncing research project; only OpenAI scaling it into ChatGPT put Google on red alert.

28:56 Competitive pressure forces companies into coherent focused execution

Omer Shai · Jan 31, 2026

Competitor valuations are irrelevant; only growth matters

Rivals are telling a good story to investors, but his own job is to run a $100M+ efficient marketing budget and sell more than $2B at Wix — eventually people will understand the story

44:10 Competitor valuations are noise only your own growth matters

Amit Bendov · Sep 12, 2025

Founders should keep their focus on the size of the prize rather than on competitors — the $7 trillion currently spent on human sales labor dwarfs any fight over mid-market forecasting share.

Competitors like Salesloft or Clari were never the ultimate competitor; the real opportunity is replacing the enormous cost of selling with human labor.

43:33 Focus on market prize size not competitor rivalry

Amit Bendov · Sep 12, 2025

Companies sometimes must detour from their long-term strategic plan to build a defensive product immediately, because once a company gets badly bruised in the market it is very hard to recover.

In 2023 Gong dropped bigger-potential strategic plans to rush out an engagement product against Salesloft and Outreach; from a position of strength it could then return to the strategic roadmap.

44:24 Defensive detours against competitors are sometimes necessary