Venture capitalists in particular pay a lot of attention to the defensibility of a startup. They want to make sure that when they invest in a company, the next company that comes along with a similar idea is going to have a hard time catching up. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, takes the notion even further: startups, he says, shoul

Competition is good, or at least not an extinction risk; over half of billion-dollar startups competed with large incumbents at the time of founding. It’s good to compete with incumbents or compete in fragmented markets; they are easier to beat than a highly funded startup with the same idea. Remember Zoom’s founder telling the story of competing a