Prompted by Love your competitors by Venki:
- My orientation to competitors (eg Kalshi and Polymarket for prediction markets, and now Lighthaven and Constellation and Frontier Tower for spaces) is pretty similar to what you describe here!
- Received startup wisdom: "startups die of suicide not murder" -- aka running out of steam is why a company fails, not being killed by competition. plan accordingly!
Positive-sum
- Marketing: For prediction markets specifically, the problem is roughly "nobody's ever heard of prediction markets" so we're pretty happy when eg Polymarket or Kalshi goes viral; it means more people experience what a prediction market is.
- It also thus makes sense for them to sponsor Manifest as a joint endeavor to "make prediction markets cool".
- Inspiration: Oftentimes, a competitor is what inspired me to start my project:
- PredictIt is what got me into prediction markets
- Future Forum, EAG is what got me to make Manifest
- Lighthaven, Constellation, The Commons is what got me to make Mox
- And so I think it’s correct to feel some amount of gratitude for them, and also try and help them out/pay them back?
- (FWIW, sometimes I’m inspired because the problem area is so important, but they’re dropping the ball, and I could do a better job. But that’s still inspiration!)
- Copying: On a feature-by-feature level, we often look at competitors and copy the best things they do. I sometimes think people are too proud and try to reinvent the wheel, when actually you should copy features liberally because a lot of brainsweat went into figuring out what a product feature should do. (or at least if you don't copy, try to understand the tradeoffs involved with their choices)
Alignment
- I often think "yeah I have 10 projects I want to do, so if some competitor copies me or just out-executes me, that's great, I can go do something else with my life, plus I now have thing I wanted without having to build it all myself"
- I love the thing where eg Elon gave away the EV patents for Tesla, or Volvo gave away the seatbelt patents
- I love the thing where a competitor sends you a cake when you launch a thing
- When Rachel was pregnant with Ada, the Kalshi folks sent us the kid’s book “Dragons Love Tacos”