Your competition is not your enemy. Your competition is your best teacher.
Work like there is someone working 24 hours a day to take it all away from you.
Ship fast, fix fast, improve fast. Speed is our moat.
Every time a competitor adds a feature, we already shipped it last month.
Speed is our competitive advantage. Traditional banks take two years to launch a feature. We take two weeks.
In Brazil, the five biggest banks controlled everything. They didn't compete with each other because they didn't have to. We gave 200 million people a reason to leave.
The BNPL winter killed our weaker competitors. It made us stronger because we had to get profitable. We did.
We don't compete with Amex on perks. We compete on making finance teams' lives easier. That's a fight we win every time.
Speed is our moat. We ship features in weeks that our competitors take quarters to build.
People say you can't compete with Google. People said you couldn't compete with Yahoo either.
Adobe paying a billion-dollar breakup fee and Figma keeping the money is the most expensive compliment anyone has ever received.
We work with grocers, not against them. Amazon wants to replace your grocery store. We want to make your grocery store better.
Being the nice guys in ride-sharing got us a lot of goodwill and about 28% market share. The market rewards ruthlessness more than kindness.
Uber was the villain. We were the hero. Turns out the hero still needs a business model.
We didn't win our Harvard business plan competition. The judges said the idea wouldn't work. We built it anyway and Uber surrendered the entire region.
Uber came to Southeast Asia with the Silicon Valley playbook. We came with local knowledge. Local knowledge won.
When Uber handed us their Southeast Asian business, it wasn't generosity. They were bleeding $700 million a year in the region and we weren't stopping.
We invented Stories. Then Instagram copied it. Then Facebook. Then LinkedIn. Then every app with a camera. You're welcome.
AWS charges you to move your own data out of their cloud. We charge zero egress fees. Let the customer decide where to put their data without being punished for moving it.
ADP was founded in 1949. Their software looks like it. We were founded in 2011 and we build for people who expect software to actually be pleasant to use.
ZoomInfo charges $30,000 a year. We charge a fraction of that for data that's just as accurate. The sales data market was overpriced for decades. We fixed that.
We don't compete with therapists. We compete with the emergency room. If we do our job, kids don't end up there.
A $15 billion market with no dominant technology platform. No venture-backed competition. No one from Silicon Valley had even looked at it. That's exactly where we wanted to be.
Amazon spent a decade building logistics in the US. We had to build it in two years because Amazon was coming to India and they weren't going to wait for us.
Luxottica owns the brands, the stores, the insurance company, and the licensing. They set the price at every step. We just decided to skip all of that.
We spend a fraction of what Coke spends on marketing and get more engagement per dollar because our content is actually entertaining. Nobody shares a Dasani ad. People share our stuff because it makes them laugh.
A competitor launched with zero fees and a token airdrop. That's not a business model — that's a customer acquisition cost disguised as a platform. We'll see who's still here in five years.
Google offered us $500 million in 2009. I said no. People thought I was crazy. But I believed Yelp could be worth more on its own — and it was, until Google decided to build their own version and embed it in every search.
People ask why Yelp still exists when Google Maps has reviews. The answer is trust. Yelp reviews are detailed, opinionated, and written by people who care. Google reviews are '5 stars, nice place.' That's not useful.
Robinhood made trading free. We made investing invisible. Those are two very different things.
Payments is not a winner-take-all market. But it is a market where the best technology wins the best merchants.
Our biggest competitor isn't another software company. It's the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet has a 40-year head start.
We're not competing with Apple. We're competing with the idea that new is always better. That's a much harder fight.
Wealthfront and us basically created this category together. The market is big enough for both. It's the old-school advisors who should be worried.
Nubank proved Brazilians would trust a digital bank. We didn't need to prove that again. We needed to prove they'd trust one with investment products too.
Headspace had a monk. We had a rainstorm. Turns out people just want to fall asleep. That insight was worth a billion dollars.
NVIDIA has the market. We have the physics. A single wafer-scale chip replaces thousands of GPUs. The math works. It just takes time for the market to catch up.
The AI boom created a GPU shortage. Every company is begging NVIDIA for chips. We offer an alternative. That's either terrible timing or perfect timing — depends on who you ask.
Google had the technology, the data, the talent, and the money. They just didn't have the courage to ship it. We had nothing except the courage.
OpenAI wants to be the AI. We want to be the AI that enterprises actually trust with their data. Those are two very different companies.
Amazon delivers in two days and Americans think it's magic. We deliver in hours. In Korea, two-day delivery would be considered slow.
SoftBank invested $255 million. They told me: you're building the Nubank of lending. I said: Nubank is the Creditas of credit cards. We started first.
Amazon sells you the cheapest version of everything. We sell you the only version of something. That's not competition — that's a completely different value proposition.
Stripe invested $20 million in us and then built the exact same product. That's Silicon Valley for you. Your investor is also your competitor.
NVIDIA builds GPUs for everything. We built a chip for one thing: running language models as fast as physically possible. Specialization always beats generalization.
The name is Groq with a Q. Not Grok with a K. We were here first. Our chip was in development before Elon named his chatbot. Just to be clear.
Zerodha proved Indians would trade. We're proving Indians will invest. Trading and investing are opposite things. One makes brokers rich. The other makes users rich.
OpenAI closed their models. We opened ours. They chose profit. We chose community. The market will decide who was right, but I know which side has more developers.
The AI race isn't about who builds the smartest model. It's about who builds the model people actually want to talk to. Empathy is the moat, not benchmarks.
We hit $45 million ARR in 18 months. Fastest-growing company in Y Combinator history at the time. Then ChatGPT launched and the whole category changed overnight.
The UP fitness band was supposed to be our future. We sold millions of them. But Fitbit sold tens of millions. And Apple was coming. We were stuck in the middle — too premium for mass market, too small for Apple.
Amazon tried to enter Latin America three times. Three times they struggled. Because Latin America isn't one market — it's 20 markets with 20 sets of rules. We know those rules. They don't.
Europe has the talent. We have some of the best AI researchers in the world. What we didn't have was a company willing to compete with OpenAI head-on. Now we do.
Microsoft has Teams and Planner bundled free with Office. Google has Workspace. We charge $10 a seat and somehow keep winning. Because good enough for free still isn't good enough.
Weight Watchers has been around for 60 years. They still make you go to meetings. We said: the meeting can happen on your phone, the coach can message you, and the community can be digital. Same outcomes. Modern delivery.
Apple Watch tracks 100 metrics. We track 20. But we track them better because we're always touching your skin. A ring has 24/7 contact. A watch gets taken off. That's the difference.
Google Pay and Paytm are strong competitors. But we have 48% of UPI market share. Nearly half of every digital payment in India goes through PhonePe. Share like that is hard to take away.
Hims is a brand. We're infrastructure. They sell you a product. We connect you to a doctor, write the prescription, fill it in our pharmacy, and deliver it to your door. That's a fundamentally different business.
We raised $141 million from Google, NVIDIA, and Salesforce. All of them want to own AI video. None of them have a product as good as ours. When your investors are also your would-be competitors, you know the tech is real.
We raised $1.1 billion. For a chip company. In a market where NVIDIA has 90% share. Either we're brilliant or insane. The benchmark results suggest brilliant. The market cap gap suggests we have work to do.
Shopee beat Lazada — which is backed by Alibaba — in every Southeast Asian market. A Singaporean startup outcompeted the most powerful e-commerce company in Asia. That wasn't supposed to happen.
Chinese manufacturers dropped the price of flat solar panels by 75% in two years. We couldn't compete on price with our cylindrical design. The technology worked. The market chose cheaper.
Monzo has the brand. Revolut has the hype. Starling has the profitability. We became the first UK neobank to turn a profit. Not revenue — profit. In banking, that's the only metric that matters.
Amazon charges sellers 40% in fees. We charge almost nothing. Sellers keep more. Prices drop. Consumers win. This is not complicated. It's just a fee structure nobody else was willing to offer.
Open-source AI is not charity. It is strategy. The companies that contribute to open models get to shape the standards everyone else builds on.
The biggest competitor is not another broker. It is the savings account paying zero percent that people are too scared to leave.
Hertz and Avis spent decades building fleets and airport counters. We built a marketplace and let the cars come to us. Turns out there were millions of them.
TikTok proved the format worked. They just did what we should have done — paid creators, added music, and actually built a business around it.
UBS tried to buy us for a reason. The big banks know their model is dying. They just cannot cannibalize their own advisor fees fast enough to compete with us.
Wirecard will be the most important financial technology company in Europe. The banks are too slow and too old to compete with us.
I helped start OpenAI as a nonprofit to keep AI safe. Then it became a for-profit chasing Microsoft money. So I had to start xAI to do what OpenAI was supposed to do.
Stripe does not work in Indonesia. PayPal barely works in the Philippines. The best payments companies in the world do not serve the fastest-growing internet economies. That is our opening.
TRON processes more transactions per day than Ethereum. Nobody wants to talk about that because it does not fit the narrative that we are just a copycat chain.
Google has AI writing in Docs. Microsoft has Copilot in Word. Apple has writing tools in iOS. And 30 million people still use Grammarly every day. That tells you something about how hard it is to build a great writing assistant.
The cloud providers all have their own monitoring tools. But nobody uses just one cloud anymore. We see across AWS, GCP, Azure, and your on-prem servers simultaneously. That is something CloudWatch will never do.
Datadog charges $31 per host per month. Our open-source stack is free. Grafana Cloud is a fraction of their price. We are not trying to out-feature Datadog — we are trying to make observability affordable for everyone.
Amazon can take any open-source project and offer it as a service. That is why we built the LGTM stack — Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir — as an integrated system. The value is in the combination, not any single tool.
Datadog added error tracking. New Relic added error tracking. Dynatrace added error tracking. We are not worried. When error tracking is your one thing versus their fifteenth feature, you win on depth every time.
FigJam, Microsoft Whiteboard, Apple Freeform — everyone launched a whiteboard tool after we proved the market existed. We have been building for 12 years. They have been building for 2. That gap shows in the product.
Coinbase listed 10 tokens and called it responsible. We listed 350 and called it giving people what they want. The market decided who was right.
When you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength. The small guys can beat the big guys if they are smarter and faster.
The most dangerous moment for any company is when it starts believing its own success is inevitable. That's when disruption walks through the door.
Coinbase made crypto easy for beginners. We made it powerful for experts. Both approaches are valid — we just chose the harder market.
Every week a new Layer 2 launches. People ask if I'm worried. No. A bigger market means more users for everyone. We don't need to be the only L2 — we need to be the best one.
We ship features faster than banks can schedule meetings about them. Speed is our moat. By the time a traditional bank decides to build something, we've already launched it, tested it, and iterated three times.
When I launched Free Mobile at €2 per month, the telecom industry called me insane. Their stock prices called them overpriced. The market agreed with me within weeks.
You don't need permission to change things. You just need to build something better and cheaper. The incumbents will fight you. The customers will thank you. Guess which one matters more.
We need to become the most aggressive company on the internet. EVER. I am dead serious. This is not a game.
Zalando started as a Zappos clone. Now it's worth more than Zappos ever was. The copy became bigger than the original. That happens when execution matters more than originality.
Everyone wants to build the next Uber. Nobody wants to buy the HVAC company that's been profitable for 20 years. That's why the HVAC company is a better deal — no competition for it.
I was the chief engineer on the Tesla Model S. I know what Tesla does well. I also know where they cut corners. Lucid is what happens when you don't cut corners.
China's EV market has 200 brands fighting for customers. Most will die. The ones that survive will need something more than a good car — they'll need an ecosystem. That's what NIO House, NIO Life, and battery swap build. Not just a car company — a lifestyle.
Everyone said a battery company had no business making cars. But I knew that eventually, cars would run on batteries. I just had to wait. In 2003, I bought a car company. In 2024, we outsold Tesla globally. The wait was worth it.
We entered China knowing we would face the toughest logistics competition on earth. If you can survive there, you can survive anywhere.
Our competition is not other education platforms. It is Netflix, YouTube, and scrolling Instagram. We are competing for leisure time, not study time.
Google invented the transformer — the architecture that powers GPT. We should have productized it faster. We are fixing that now.
SpaceX proved private companies can reach orbit. We proved you do not need to be a billionaire to do it.
Instagram copied our format with Reels. YouTube copied it with Shorts. The best compliment is when every competitor tries to become you.
Live audio requires you to show up at a specific time. That is the opposite of what TikTok taught people — consume content whenever, wherever.
Twitter Spaces, Spotify Greenroom, Facebook Live Audio — everyone copied us within months. Imitation is flattering until it commoditizes your product.
Every time Elon Musk makes X worse, our sign-ups spike. We did not plan that marketing strategy, but we will take it.
Uber spent $2 billion trying to beat us in China. They lost. Markets are won by the company that understands local culture, not the company with the most funding.
We beat Uber in China. That should have been the biggest victory in ride-hailing history. Instead, it was a footnote before the regulatory storm.
When CrowdStrike crashed 8.5 million machines in July 2024, every CISO in the world asked the same question: do we really want one vendor with this much power? That question is our opportunity.
Cybersecurity is an arms race with no finish line. The attackers evolve every day. If we stop innovating for one quarter, we lose.
We are the number two in endpoint security. CrowdStrike is number one. But number two with autonomous AI will eventually beat number one with human analysts.
The best way to compete with Google is to give developers something Google never will — the ability to leave.
Figma was winning prototyping. So we stopped competing and found a bigger market.
WordPress won because it was free not because it was good. We want to win because the product is actually great.
I do not care what Instagram copies. By the time they copy it we have already moved on to the next thing.
We burned billions fighting Zomato. We would do it again. In India market share is destiny.
Revolut has 40 million users and billions in losses. Bunq has 12 million users and is profitable. I prefer our model.
OpenAI is brilliant for consumers. For regulated enterprises the question is: do you trust your data to a company that has no obligation to protect it?
We were one of the first to turn GPT-3 into a product. Then OpenAI released ChatGPT and did it for free. Welcome to AI.
Fifteen million users signed up. Then we had to explain why they should pay us when ChatGPT exists. That is the hardest pivot in AI.
DJI is Chinese. We are American. As the US government bans Chinese drones we are the only domestic option with autonomous AI flight.
My children — in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.
People underestimate Oracle because we don't do flashy product launches. We just win enterprise deals.
Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.
I've made money and I've lost money. I'd rather be in the game losing than sitting in the stands watching.
Complexity is where the opportunity lives. Simple situations attract too much competition.
The only way to beat a competitor is to build something they can't or won't build.
While you're dreaming, someone else is working. While you're sleeping, someone else is building.
Western Union has 500,000 physical locations. We have a phone app. The phone is winning.
We created a category. That's the good news. The bad news is 50 competitors copied it immediately.
SoulCycle charges $35 per class. Peloton is unlimited classes for $44 per month. The math sells itself.
Competing with GitHub means competing with Microsoft. We do it by being open, transparent, and community-driven.
OpenAI has 1000x our compute budget. We compete by being faster, more creative, and more consumer-friendly.
Competing with free is hard. But serious teams need serious analytics. Google Analytics is a toy for what we do.
Being better than free is hard. But when free means managing Kafka yourself, our managed service sells itself.
Google Maps is everywhere. We exist for the developers who want something Google doesn't offer: independence.
Competing with free is our entire business challenge. We have to be so much better that paid beats free.
4 million members use Current. In a market with 50 neobanks, that means our product is working.
Lululemon charges $128 for leggings. Ours are just as good at $59. In a recession, we win that comparison.
Nvidia won't be the only game in town forever. Every monopoly creates its own competition.
CUDA is Nvidia's real moat — not the chip. Software lock-in is the hardest barrier to break.
Robinhood made trading free. We made investing simple. Those are very different things.
Fortnite copied our concept and got bigger. But PUBG Mobile earned $9 billion. We're not complaining.
47% efficacy versus 95% for Moderna and BioNTech. Same technology, different execution. That gap is everything.
Instagram fatigue is real. Users want curated aesthetic content without the social pressure.
We fought Uber to a standstill in India. Now we're building electric scooters. Same fight, different vehicle.
Zillow lost $881 million on iBuying and quit entirely. We're still here, which is either brave or stubborn.
Shopify is for small merchants. Salesforce is for US enterprises. VTEX is for everyone in between and beyond.
Dropbox got the consumer market. We got the Fortune 500. I'll take that trade.
If you're going to compete with Tesla, you have to be better, not just different. Better range, better interior, better engineering.
We were always the underdog. Uber had more money, more aggression, more everything. We had a better culture.
Being number two teaches you things being number one never will. Resourcefulness, creativity, and the value of every single customer.
I fought to be the best in six weight classes. I fight to be the best promoter the sport has ever seen. The ring teaches you that the only thing that matters is showing up better prepared than the other person.
An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.
When you start a race, you're afraid of two things: dying, and finishing second.
The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.
I never rooted against an opponent. I only rooted for myself.
Winning isn't everything, but wanting to win is.
Racing was the most competitive environment I have ever been in. Everything else feels easier by comparison.
Swimming taught me that you can train harder than everyone else and still lose. Markets are the same. Effort is necessary but not sufficient.
If your hiring process takes longer than your competitor's, you are losing the best candidates before you even make an offer.
We priced our four-wheel-drive tractors at half what John Deere charged. Same horsepower, simpler design, fewer parts to break. Farmers figured it out fast.
In China, if you are not the number one player in your market within three years, you are dead. Speed is survival.
I do not think about competitors. I think about what users need that they are not getting.
Huawei is like a wolf. We hunt in packs and we do not stop until we catch the prey.
We compete with Microsoft and Salesforce. We are a fraction of their size. But we are profitable and they depend on Wall Street. I like our position better.
Tesla dropped us in 2016. They said they'd build it themselves. We're in 170 million cars. They're in about 5 million.
We spend more on Google than almost any company on Earth. When your biggest expense is your biggest competitor's ad platform, you think about that a lot.
We're not competing with travel agents. We're competing with spreadsheets and email chains. That's the real enemy of business travel.
A Concept2 costs $900 and lasts forever. We cost $2,500 and require a subscription. We have to make the experience worth that gap. Every single day.
Our biggest competitor isn't Peloton or TrainerRoad. It's good weather. When the sun is shining, people ride outside. We'll never beat sunshine.
Big ag companies are not happy about us. When you save farmers 30% on seed costs, someone's 30% margin just disappeared. They notice.
South Africa's big banks charge R50-150 per month just for a basic account. We charge zero. When your competition is a monthly fee, free is a feature.
Speed kills the competition. If you can get from sketch to store in two weeks, nobody can copy you fast enough.
An airport does not have a startup competitor. That is the entire investment thesis.
Global scale is not optional for Indian companies anymore. You either compete worldwide or you get bought.
My father taught me that a strong Swiss franc is painful but it forces you to be better. You cannot compete on price. You must compete on quality.
I have been in sport my whole life. I played tennis professionally. I understand what competing at the highest level requires. It requires everything.
You cannot compete with Amazon by being Amazon. You compete by being something Amazon cannot be.
Fixed-mobile convergence is the name of the game in European telecoms. The companies that can offer both services will win.
Virgin Media O2 is a genuine game-changer for UK telecoms. No other company can offer what this combination brings to market.
Competition is a gift. AMD forced Intel to be better. Intel forced AMD to be better. The industry is where it is because neither side could afford to stand still.
We are not playing for second place. We are playing to win. That is true at UWM and it is true with the Phoenix Suns.
The internet was supposed to make markets more efficient and more fair. In local search, it is currently doing the opposite.
Google has built an ecosystem where they profit no matter how you search, but small businesses pay the price.
The Sunglass Hut thing was a declaration of war. We fought back.
Speed is everything in business. If you're not moving fast, someone else is.
We protect this house.
Competition is healthy. It sharpens your instincts and forces you to become better at what you do.
When Home Depot came into our markets, we made sure our prices were better. That was the whole plan.
Even when you are number one, you have to think and fight like a challenger.
We could not win in Korea by copying the global players. We had to build something they could not.
Shared, open data is what changes the game. It lowers the barriers to competition at the app layer and pushes value down to the protocol.