Monitoring and copying potential threats at early stage is an obvious and effective strategy. This is the unpleasant thing about many startups, technology is a commodity, the big players can simply copy it (or buy it if they think it's cheaper).<p>Honestly, I think it's unfair. You can put effort into making an amazing though-out product with a lot of novel ideas behind it, but the big players can simply copy you and use their monopoly power (network effects, integration into existing product, marketing) to make a superior product.<p>The problem is that companies like Facebook or Google are monopolies which use their monopoly profits to further expand their imperiums. In a competitive market, profit margins around 30 % would be impossible, because a competitors would push the prices close to 0 % margin (btw, the "real" profit margin is much more than 30 %, because these companies put lot of resources into research, buying overpriced startups, and in general are not very efficient with money). This just sucks in my opinion...