“Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”

Funny - I have an email from pg from 2011 where YC didn&#x27;t fund OpenRent [1] due to our competitors being too dominant.<p>As head strong (and certainly naiive) young founders at the time, we continued with our vision anyway. Thankfully we have gone on to become by far the largest rental agency in the uk, and have driven real change (see tenant fees ban) in the industry.<p>I mention this as when it comes to investment decisions, competitors &#x2F; incumbents of course <i>do</i> matter. But as per what I think pg means here, when running your own business any time spent thinking about the next startup to raise a bucket load of cash is of course wasted. That has certainly been the case in our industry where this seems to happen on a monthly basis.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openrent.co.uk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openrent.co.uk</a>

Full text is:<p>&gt; At both Viaweb and YC, every minute I spent thinking about competitors was, in retrospect, a minute wasted.<p>Follow-up tweet:<p>&gt; It may be useful for some companies to think about competitors. That&#x27;s why I didn&#x27;t phrase it as a general rule. In particular it may be useful for more established companies to. If a startup has to, though, they&#x27;re probably doomed.<p>Also a quote from Jeff Bezos:<p>&gt; “If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different, it’s this: We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented, and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work in two or three years, they will move on to something else. And they prefer to be close followers rather than inventors, because it’s safer. So if you want to capture the truth about Amazon, that is why we are different. Very few companies have all of those three elements.”<p>As a side note, I added […] in the title to show this isn&#x27;t the complete text but it got scrubbed then removed.

Totally agree with PG on this.<p>This isn’t the first time he says this obviously and has put a lot of thought into this. The quote I really like from him on this topic is:<p>“A startup worrying about competitors is like a fat guy smoking a cigarette as he worries about contracting West Nile Virus.”<p>I like to remind my two friends helping me build our side project right now of this reality all the time. There are so many things that could kill us at this stage, a competitor is the least likely.

You have no idea how relevant this is to me at exactly this moment! About an hour ago, I found out that a competitor (a larger incumbent player) released a feature today that I had built and released 6 months ago!<p>I&#x27;ve been panicking the last couple of hours, but now it&#x27;s back to the grind. I&#x27;ve got a lot more feature ideas in mind, and this is just that extra push to do the things I&#x27;ve been putting off.

I call bullshit. If he thought about competitors, it obviously affected his actions. So how can he know, he would be where he is today, if he hadn&#x27;t thought about competitors? This is just another Silicon Valley bullshit statement...

Man but it&#x27;s so hard to stop thinking. People said to build an MVP. I did. Comparing it with competitors, it looks empty. It gets the job done but what about other 107 integrations with third-party APIs my competitors provide? Even if I show it to my potential customers, it feels like cheating. I feel like if they know about my competitors they&#x27;re bound to leave my software for sure. This sucks, even more, when you are a solo developer. If I start chasing every feature competitors have it&#x27;s gonna take me a decade to build. Man but I&#x27;ve put so much work already I don&#x27;t want to give up too. It&#x27;s a tiring mental dilemma.

That&#x27;s coming from a guy whose startup Viaweb was essentially made completely irrelevant by a competitor (Amazon) with a better strategy. Does anyone really buy things on Yahoo stores anymore?<p>If you want to grow fast and sell out, then you probably don&#x27;t need to worry about competitors, but if you want to stay in business for a long time, you do need to worry about having sustainable competitive advantages.

Or, in other news: “millionaire cherry picks anecdotes from his past to make him look like a visionary”.

Sounds more like survivorship bias than actual good advice.

In the US Civil War, general Sherman was brilliant at logistics and military science and had one of the most prescient views of the wars length and brutality at its outset. And yet, US Grant was made the overall field commander by Lincoln. Of Grant, Sherman argued he himself was better at generaling than Grant in almost every way except this:<p>Grant doesn&#x27;t give a damn what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell.

This advice is presented for startups, but it’s pretty relevant for life in general too. E.g. dating, career success, physical fitness, achievement. Focus on delivering your unique value to the world, not on beating the other guy.

&#x27;One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. &#x27; T.S. Eliot in The Sacred Wood.

Ain&#x27;t nothin&#x27; wrong with a healthy dose of competitive research. At the very least you need to know where you stand. Just be aware that your competitors are about as clueless about things as you are, and they too don&#x27;t know wtf they&#x27;re doing. But do by all means collect nuggets of wisdom as long as you aren&#x27;t spending too much time doing it.<p>Also, if you take these pearls of wisdom fro village elders seriously, remember, there&#x27;s a selection bias at play.

And then at every vc&#x2F;incubator they ask you, why are you better than your competitors?

Met my co-founder arbitrarily and had to end the relationship because of this very reason - he would spend the entire day looking at competition and freaking out about it. Was a bad sign!

I hate to be a dissenting voice here. And I agree that “worrying” is a problem, but you should absolutely be looking at your contemporaries.<p>My studio recently released a product that seems to be being praised for the fact we did not construct it in a vacuum and learned from the misgivings of our own product and other products in the same genre.

A lot of what you need to do in your startup is actually just obbvious. Spending time thinking about competitors or other things that are out of your control is a waste of time. When asked how the amazon business will be different 10 years from now, Bezos often says the same thing - that 10 years from now customers arent going to wake up one day and say i want amazon to deliver slower, i want less selection from amazon or i want higher prices. so just focusing on those three things and not worrying about what your competitors do or dont do would put you much farther ahead. youve just gotta figure out what those three or four things are for your business - the core stuff that customers really want and just keep focusing on making those things better.

Why is the creator of HN not on HN anymore? Or is he? Has he entirely moved to Twitter or is he still posting and commenting on HN?

bs. it&#x27;s like telling a PhD candidate no need doing reference research. being a good startup is not only about solving customers problem well, but solving in the best way and preferably first to solve.

What <i>exactly</i> were you thinking about when &quot;thinking&quot; about your competitors?

I get what he means, but... it&#x27;s probably easier to say that &quot;in retrospect&quot; when your ventures are as successful as his.

Jean Marie Dedecker, Belgian politician now, formerly Olympic judo coach, made his team combat internally.<p>They won a lot of prices, but that&#x27;s because the global championships were &quot;just a practice&quot; for being the best internally. Not bothering others, not settling for a second place. Ever

Yeah, but what about thinking strategically, placing figures on a virtual chess board, anticipating moves, etc? Assuming their actions can affect you, or otherwise them wouldn&#x27;t be competitors. If this is a wasted effort to someone, maybe they just aren&#x27;t doing this right.

One of the best talks about this exact same topic is &quot;The infinite players are the ones that frustrate their competitors.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=x5nAaxIkmFE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=x5nAaxIkmFE</a>

Cool dialogue between PG and Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow cofounder) on the tweet thread - From Jeff: “You can always borrow concepts and ideas from other startups, too. It&#x27;s good to look, and understand the competitive landscape in detail, but not to obsess over.“

Andy Grove and bill gates probably have a different opinion. Everyone has a different opinion.

Side jab... hasn&#x27;t posted on HN since 2015 but regular on Twitter? What gives?

Definitely in many contexts this is appropriate.Elsewhere in this discussion someone mentions Amazon, who is famously customer &#x27;obsessed&#x27;. However Amazon do watch their competitors closely also - AWS changes based on competitors and indeed the price of products on Amazon changes based on competitor prices. I personally think you should not worry and obsess over your competitors and definitely should focus on your customers, however ensuring you are not blindsided by a change that a competitor makes is really important.

Being aware of what competitors are doing is a good thing I think.

I’m not sure what spirit this is written in but as the author notes it absolutely doesn’t generalise. Actually it generalises less and less the smaller your company and the more critical your focus and USP is to survival.

Quite interesting quotes and even more interesting comments.<p>My take is that entrepreneurs need to be obsessed with their Market(s) and Domain expertise; which includes also the other players (competition) but not just competition per se.

Agree with PG.<p>I mean I&#x27;d love to have the free time to be able sit analyze and strategize against what my competitors are doing, but I&#x27;m too busy working on the next place which I believe will add the most value. In the end you&#x27;ll end up with a different priority&#x2F;feature-set and USPs that focusing and trying to replicate what your competitors are doing.<p>IMO the most important thing is to have a solid Customer base, they&#x27;ll submit an infinite stream of issues&#x2F;feature requests which will highlight where to focus your efforts on. Although it&#x27;s also important to have confidence in innovating yourself as my best USPs have come from novel features that no-one has thought to ask for, as you&#x27;ll pretty much only receive requests for features others have already done.

Almost every link to Twitter posted here, when I click on it from an Android...gives me a &quot;you&#x27;re rate limited&quot; page. Odd.

don&#x27;t you re-invent the wheel a lot if you don&#x27;t look it other solutions? Especially for things not in your core domain.

I don&#x27;t really think much about my competitors, although I must admit I flatter myself thinking they think about me.

This kind of recommendations are so simple but they have a really deep and truly meanings.

I have the same feeling. Thinking about competitors eats more than social networks.

YC explicitly moved from Boston to SV to pre-empt competition.

Every minute I spent thinking about insightful quotes from modern day gurus was a minute wasted

One word: Blackberry.

&quot;Love your enemies&quot;. There is no enemy and no competitor.

I am fairly mentally exhausted at the moment. When I first read the message, and noted the author, I thought it said: &quot;every minute I spent thinking about <i>computers</i> was a minute wasted.&quot; I was like, wow, that&#x27;s a big change in course. Is he going to become a monk or something? Lol. time to turn off the computer.

If he hadn’t spent the thinking time, he wouldn’t have come to this realization. By wasting time, he gained experience. It was thus not wasted.<p>Gaining experience is inherently an inefficient process. It’s the nature of the beast. (And it’s tweetable).