WHEN YOU NEED TO BE MANIACALLY FOCUSED ON YOUR BUSINESS

Dear Founder,

So, you’re worried about competition?

If you are just starting out, don’t be! If you worry too much about what you are up against, you will never start something new. We’d still buy tickets through travel agents instead of online, we’d still use taxis instead of Uber or Lyft, and there would be no Facebook—only a failed Myspace. Competition—whether you’re competing against another company or the status quo—is what evolves old ideas, inspires new ones, and makes the world work better.

If you are scaling and building a legacy company, you should be aware of and prepared for competition—it’s relentless and companies do crazy things to gain market share from one another—but this isn’t something most startup founders have to be hyperfocused on. The problem with putting too much emphasis on the competition is that it causes us to lose sight of where we are going. It’s hard to run up the stairs when one is always looking right and left, and constantly checking to see who might be coming up from behind. What is important is to stay grounded in your vision or strategy—not that you try to keep up with someone else’s. Remember, you are the one in control of the narrative about who you are and where you are going.

The week I officially joined eBay, and it was still a new (and struggling) company, Microsoft and Dell launched an online auction site called FairMarket. Everyone was very worried about this initiative. We wondered: Could this be the end of eBay?

Obviously, we now know how this story ends: Just because you have a big name doesn’t mean you will get a big win. FairMarket never became a real threat and eBay wound up buying it a few years later. Had we gotten bogged down in competing against them, we would have lost track of what we were doing, changed our strategy to account for their influence, and given them validation in the market they didn’t warrant. It was more powerful to focus on what we wanted.

We had built a true global marketplace where consumers found items they wanted and entrepreneurs (sellers) found new markets for their products. FairMarket was intended to be a place where large companies could move their products. We were the place at that time where people came to shop. And, we decided to stay focused on this approach and how to become better at it. We prioritized what was most important: scalability (we had significant service issues due to our growth), trust (we had to make transactions safer for consumers), friction (most of the payments were by check or money order as opposed to PayPal), and user experience. We also expanded into multiple countries, either via new launches (like in the United Kingdom) or acquisition (like in Germany). So, while we kept an eye on what the competition was doing, we spent most of our time making our successful service better, safer, easier to use, and more global.

That experience showed the value in knowing what is going on around you, but not letting it disable you. Be acutely aware of markets and customers, and listen to what they are telling you. And more importantly, you need to be able to predict where they are heading.

But you must be more focused on what you want to achieve and constantly working to get better. (The path to achievement rests on setting aggressive yet achievable goals and monitoring results.) You are your most important competition. If you don’t build a product or service of relevance, it really doesn’t matter what your competition does. I always find inspiration in sports: As Michael Jordan said, “You have competition every day because you set such high standards for yourself that you have to go out every day and live up to that.” That attitude is how he got to be one of the greatest basketball players of all time—and it’s really the secret for anyone to succeed.

All the best,

Maynard