on competition
Cirque du Soleil succeeded because it realized that to win in the future, companies must stop competing with each other. The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.
W. Chan Kim • Blue Ocean Strategy
never badmouth your competition. it makes you look insecure.
“At both Viaweb and YC, every minute I spent thinking about competitors was, in retrospect, a minute wasted... It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors — so rare that you can almost discount the possibility... Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more
... See moreI think the first point of treating competitors with an ordinary mind is to see competition as the norm. Don't try to escape the competition, it's a good thing. I don't even think that competition should be ended by doing M&A. We see a lot of companies that eliminate their rivals through M&A becoming complacent and end up slacking off.
Zhang Yiming • Zhang Yiming’s Last Speech: Part II
‘Do not try to be the best. Be the only.’ It helps me believe in a positive-sum world—where my success does not hinge on the failure of others, and I am not in a rat-race.” — Nishant Jain
Caroline Cala Donofrio • The Best Advice I've Ever Heard
Play your own game where no one can compete with you
Tony Sheng • #07 - Erik Torenberg thinks we should build career moats
Of course, we should also keep in mind "do not compete for the sake of competition". Sometimes, after a prolonged period of competition, the only goal becomes simply beating the competitor. For example, in the Microsoft-Google competition, Microsoft for a long time saw defeating Google as its goal, and invested heavily in search. It wasn't until a
... See moreZhang Yiming • Zhang Yiming’s Last Speech: Part II
Mike Krieger (founder of Instagram) when Lenny asks him how he thinks about Claude vs. ChatGPT:
“Look yourself in the mirror and embrace who you are and what you could be rather than like who others are is maybe the, the way I've been looking you at it”
Mike when Lenny asks him what is still helpful for product teams to do now that we have AI:
“One