Competition

“I don't think competition is what kills startups at our stages, right? It's competition makes you do stupid things like copy other players or go toward the second, a different direction.”

“When you elevate structures of capitalism to a religion per se, when it's not anchored in morality and love for other people and a responsibility to perhaps even the divine, what you're going to do is you're going to cut corners and you're not going to get the…”

“Look, I think if they're long, if they look weird and they look wrong, then probably there aren't gonna be 15 or 20 or a hundred other startups doing it. So you're probably gonna have two or three years without real competition.”

“The presence of competition pushes you to define yourself more specifically, and focuses you on the things that you want to do, and You know, definitely makes you work a little bit harder. So, you know, most people, when they first start a company, and then th…”

“Most people are not, like, taken out by competition. Most people sabotage themselves”

“If you're not going to be surprising competition, which means there's no advantage, ok? Forget it.”

“Whatever you do that's great technology. Celebrate it, get it working, and then replace it. If you don't replace it, then you're going to competition as well.”

“As per me, sweet spot is if you're able to find, let's say one or two direct competitors with some customers, That validates the problem exists, but also validates that it's just very nascent where the, if the whole market grows, your company will grow with it…”

“Very often, it's honestly just like, it's an environment that just narrows the focus on fairly unambitious things, at which point you get stuck competing with literally everyone else in the world because everyone's unambitious.”

“You know, if you view your work as art, you have no competition and you have no fear of failure, and I think it just removes this anxiety that you have over it needing to be perfect or anything like that.”

“At a certain point, like once you have the formula dialed in and you are the power law company, the competition is actually beneficial to you.”

“And when we do a lot of comparisons to the competition, usually the competition spends much more money on marketing and design and less on accuracy of the technology and accuracy of the answers and even the citations. A lot of folks just Fake their citations a…”

“Sell to your ICP. It tastes good, but if you do this more than four quarters, the competition is going to pass you by. They're just going to pass you by, right?”

“Frankly, there's no substitute for limited competition. You can be a genius, but if there's a lot of competition, it won't matter. I've spent my career trying to avoid its destructive consequences. Competition skews people's assessments. As buyers get competit…”

“And historically, America has chosen the path of more competition, and I believe that's what's contributed to just the phenomenal economic growth that we've seen and the birth of so many fantastic companies.”

“The reality is I really truly believe that capitalism and competition are the only chance we have to provide a, an optimizer that is capable of getting us to the right place. I think we need the right guardrails to do that.”

“At least some competition is essential. I think very few companies pull their selves into a coherent shape, and deliver in a focused way without some scope of competition.”

“So our product was priced at nine dollars, 19 dollars and 29 dollars per agent per month. That was the highest. Our competition, the lowest price was 29 dollars a month to get started, right?”

“And what he's really saying is like, if we can do something really hard, we won't have any competition.”

“It's got a tremendous performance advantage, and we did that very purposely. We created very efficient engines for the math processing that you need for that training or inference processing, but we also brought the memory that you need to have more efficient …”

“The ambition typically, or ambition is typically a word used to talk about, like, amassing, and collecting, and growing. You know, it can also mean, in my opinion, like, it should mean existing, sustaining. I'm ambitious at that level, but I don't need to go d…”

“Frankly, there's no substitute for limited competition. You can be a genius, but if there's a lot of competition, it will not matter.”

“Wide open competition is ultimately destructive, because there's always someone who's willing to do it for cheaper than you are. Or do it in a manner that you're just not willing to do.”

“I mean, you actually need competition to build markets. If you're the only company in a space, it's, it can be a lot harder.”

“Most of what we think is competition is just made up and is hurting your happiness.”

“I think internally, you have to think about them and view them at their best. Arrogance is super contagious. You know, if people see, like, the founders or other people at the team are like, oh, the Competition is fine, or they don't understand this or that. I…”

“Competition is tough. It motivates all of us, but it's the most destructive force in capitalism, no doubt about it.”

“Big companies move from variable costs to fixed costs, and that's how they're able to get their pricing down and really beat the competition. When you get bigger, that's how you're able to knock out all the little companies that are out there, but it also is a…”

“It's not that everyone has the expectation that they're going to become LeBron or Kanye West or anything like that, but the idea that it's possible and that one person is going to win the Hunger Games is going to really kind of, it drives the level of competit…”

“Like if fundamentally you don't kind of break up these data monopolies in some way, then I don't think there's, I think it has reduced competition and there's no easy way for other people to compete.”

“If you make it super clear and super transparent, you're not gonna run into that problem, and if you have the law being around, ah, clearness and transparency and you have lots of competition. That's what will bring the rates down.”

“If you don't have any competition, you're probably working on something that you actually, either you're so smart that no one else can figure out how to do and the world needs, or more likely, no one thinks they need it, and you might not be working on somethi…”

“If you have no competition, that's a bad sign. You know, that's usually means you're in a small market.”

“When entrepreneurs say of competition, that's validating. When somebody sees news of a competitor and says, oh, you know, it's definitely validating of our market or something like that, I pull my hair out because I don't want you to find competition validatin…”

“Usually if the founder is super defensive and flips out about it, that is a good red flag for you, right? That is a very good red flag if the person has a very hard time Speaking on an even tone about competition, or is unwilling to admit the competition eithe…”