How to frame your competition
In fast-moving landscapes, top founders set the frame with three layers.
“We’re competing with sleep.” —Reed Hastings
I recently heard a founder say the most annoying question they regularly get from investors was, “Why won’t Google just build this?”
Most founders are answering the wrong competitive question, consistently underestimating how competitive positioning shapes their entire story—they miss a critical opportunity for narrative control.
Early-stage investors are looking to pattern match. In the absence of a compelling frame, they often retreat to a default assumption like “incumbents win.” It is the founder’s job to set the frame for what they should be matched to, before the investor reaches into their mental archive of patterns.
Competition around sound ideas emerges in a matter of weeks, not months. In fast-moving, crowded markets, founders need layered storytelling to transmit why their product is different, and why now. Capturing a new market is one of the fastest-closing windows of opportunity, which partially explains why so much capital now chases early traction.
The best way to stay ahead is to cultivate a story that compounds across three layers:
Platform layer
LLMs represent a once in a generation platform shift, and every week new models offer new capabilities and kill dozens of startups. Articulating the antifragility of your product amidst general model improvements is what I call the platform layer of storytelling.
An OpenAI executive recently told me that the best early-stage founders obsess over how each model release reshapes the playing field. They’re not just chasing scraps of capability, they’re looking for the one or two shifts that let them position as indispensable complements rather than replaceable commodities. That’s the work of the platform layer: showing investors you’ve thought harder than anyone else about how your product gains strength as the foundation models evolve and improve.
Startup layer
The startup layer is about understanding the venture-backed players already ahead in your market. What have they built, and for whom? How are their products priced and why? What is worth building vs. leveraging off the shelf? Where can you learn from their expensive mistakes?
To be safe, founders should assume that early investors have met with their competitors, and in some cases, your potential customers. The potential storytelling advantage emerges from the assumption that every startup is resource constrained and therefore makes choices from the earliest stage of the product and business that necessarily limit the permutations of where their business can go. Use this to your advantage, study your competitors assumptions, and then explain why your set of assumptions and choices will lead to a better outcome.
Tactically, this is the “table slide” that positions your company relative to its peers: capital raised, commercial traction, tools and features etc.
Vision layer
The vision layer is where the magic happens—and where generational entrepreneurs shine.
Take Larry Gagosian (must-read: New Yorker profile). He once visited collector Si Newhouse’s airy apartment and asked, “Why do you need so many windows? Don’t you find the view a bit boring?” Larry understood that, although he was an art dealer, his competition was no longer other galleries. It was windows impeding on the open space for more purchases from his top customers.
Or Reed Hastings, who at the height of the streaming wars, was asked how Netflix positioned themselves against Amazon and HBO. His response: “We’re competing with sleep.” While others debated the ROI on originals or the cost of exclusive, legacy IP, Reed was framing a much larger opportunity for the future of Netflix.
The takeaway
Competition is not a threat to defend against. It’s an opportunity to redefine the game by framing the problem on your own terms. Define yourself in someone else’s context, and you’ll be limited by their success and their constraints. Frame the problem on your own terms and shape everything: investor perception, team alignment, product direction.
Don’t get caught flat-footed by peers or a rapidly evolving startup ecosystem, but don’t let them define your course, either. Go on offense.