I think when you're being authentic, you don't really mind competition that much.

Yeah, it pisses you off and it inspires some fear and jealousy and all the other emotions that come along with it.

But also you don't really mind because you're more oriented towards the goal and the mission.

And worst case, you get some ideas from them and there's often ways to work with the competition in a positive way.

And it ends up increasing the size of the market for you.

Yeah, sometimes it depends on the nature of the business.

Silicon Valley tech industry businesses tend to be winner-take-all, at least the good ones.

And so when you see competition, it can make you fly into a rage because it really does endanger everything you've built.

Whereas if I was opening a restaurant and a more interesting version of the same restaurant opens up in a different town,

that's fantastic. I'm just going to lift from them what's working and drop what I can see that they have already figured out is not working.

So it does depend to some extent on the nature of the business.

That said, even the businesses that seem like that they are often direct competition really aren't.

They can end up adjacent or slightly different.

You're one step away from a completely different business and sometimes you need to take that one step

and you're not going to be able to take it if you're busy fighting over a booby prize.

Kind of you're playing a stupid game, you're going to win a stupid prize and it's not obvious right now because you're blinded by competition.

But three years from now it'll be obvious to give a simple example when I was first starting companies, one of my first ones was called opinions,

which was an online product review site for all the products out there that was independent of Amazon.

And that space eventually turned into TripAdvisor and Yelp, which is where we should have gone.

We should have done more local reviews because there's more value to having a review of a scarce item like in their local restaurant that is of an item like a camera,

which is going to have a thousand reviews on Amazon.

But before we could get there, we got caught up in the whole comparison shopping game.

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