By: Nick Ganzel
Whether it’s the NBA Finals, the Super Bowl, or just your Saturday Softball league competition, everyone wants to know about the competition. “Who’s their best player?” “How do we stop them?” “Are they actually that good?” are all common questions I’ve heard in my over a decade of sporting competition. But what I never expected was to hear them off the field, let alone in the conference room. Yet here we are years later asking the same questions, and for very good reason.
Sun Tzu, as he often does, puts it best: “If you know your enemy and yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles”. Pretty simple right? See, this can be applied to much more than just war. Keeping it simple, let’s see what happens when we take it and apply it to the venture capital world.
Starting off with the biggest question, often the “elephant” in the room in more ways than one; Who is the biggest competition in this industry? Now this is important for a multitude of reasons. Venture Capitalists will often hesitate when learning that your main competition is massive, as that can mean that it will be hard for your company to break into the space.
That leads to the next big question; How much Venture Capital is already being injected into the industry? Many small companies are okay, but one large one with tons of capital already, that’s gonna be viewed as a problem by potential investors.
Now that you know your biggest competitor and how much capital is being injected into the space, you should be looking for companies that operate similarly to yours, whether that means software or even the product itself. On the same token you should be cognisant of the differentiators as well. Find what makes you different from the competition and seize on that, because that is what will make you and your company stand out from the rest.
