I’ve been wearing a mindset, which I probably got from the open source community, that I think is helpful. Always cheer for the success of other people, especially if they are working on the same thing as you (also known in normie startup land as “competition”).

Yes, you want to do your best and be amazing, but if you fail, those people maybe won’t. They are the people who are solving the same problem. It’s a source of inspiration and also your baseline, which keeps moving. PnL is slow feedback, they are doing market testing with you and you can learn from them.

Some strange ways this manifested in my life:

- In many cases, I’d rather meet with my competitors (who have similar goals to me). Often, it makes for a much more interesting dinner conversation than customers (although I love customers too). Especially if they share this view and talk openly about their experiences. It requires of course more than one person with this mindset in order for the situation not to get awkward (I was lucky in this way so far, but I religiously avoid toxic people).

- Once I realized one business model in a company that I owned could be disrupted. But also it was an incredibly hard thing to pull off. I called my best competitors to tell them that I was building it and they could join in the venture. I did not want to front-run them, to the contrary, I wanted the best minds. If our businesses were to be disrupted, we would do it to ourselves. Much less resistance in disruption. We could still compete in the old business model. (We spectacularly failed to deliver the disruption and got outcompeted by others, but it was a fun experience anyway).

In open-source and in Bitcoin / wider cryptography based solutions / Nostr, we are basically working on the same project, even if we compete. If someone else increases the network effect and features of Bitcoin/Nostr/open protocol/Linux/…., it “pumps our shared bags”. This requires only one thing – don’t be attached to your project, be attached to the result, regardless of who does it.

- In open-source, it is a blessing if someone does it better than you. Maintaining a project is difficult and time consuming. Being able to tell your users “go over there, it’s a better solution, this project no longer maintained” gives you free time to do other things.

- It helped us define our unique capability in a few projects. The threat of competition (and perceived “lower price” they offered) ignited a long conversation within our teams about what we are actually good at, what we’re offering and why no one else can offer it. Then build that part and focus on it. Price sensitive customers can get the “worse” but apparently cheaper product if they don’t want our unique thing. We realized we don’t want all customers, only those that are a fit for us. I’ve done this multiple times, I even sent potential customers to the competition if they were not a good fit for us. In many (but not all) markets, what’s important is that the market grows. If it grows, smaller share of a bigger pie is still bigger than before. Grow the pie, not your percentage share. Cooperation grows the pie, fights make it smaller (unless the market is in the first “problem marketing phase”, but it’s cheap loser-level marketing to fight anyway, it might work, but is it who we really want to be?).

- I am generally more pleasant to be around. I will not hurt people just because they are solving the same problem, to the contrary, I want to see how we can make the world better together, even if we are not really working together. If there are others who do the same, you will see that, they are super pleasant to be around and it just raises the energy of everything. Hackathons are often like that – you are competing for the prize, but OMG, how cool to be among such capable people!

I wish you all the best in your endeavors, I benefit from them greatly! Today the world, tomorrow the solar system!

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