As part of our Raising Giants app we speak to CEOs and Founders of successful companies and ask them to share their thoughts with our own Startup Giants’ founders.
Peer to peer learning is so interesting and inspirational. Here’s a snippet from six of our CEO’s and Founders who shared their view on their competitors with our own Founders. Who do you agree with?
Mikhail Dubov, CEO & Co-Founder, Chattermill
In my view, healthy competition ultimately breeds innovation, in both product, and customer experience. Our attitude towards our competitors is healthy – we don’t see ourselves in a head-to-head battle.
From experience, businesses that take this approach can often take shortcuts to try and dominate the market, and this inevitably impacts end-users in the long-run – whether through higher pricing, a degraded customer experience, or an inflexible technology that atrophies over time. If our customers want to use our competitors to collect data, and then use our platform to glean customer intelligence from it, that’s absolutely fine by me. Our platform is set up to integrate with all customer technologies. We’re agnostic in that way.
Why? Because what we care about is giving our customers Unified Customer Intelligence.
Our platform transforms customer data into insights and intelligence that can help our customers improve their CX, drive revenue, and create shareholder value. How customers collect their customer data in the first place is up to them.
Gabi Matic, Cofounder & Director, Metta
We believe that one of the biggest problems the innovation and startup ecosystem has, both here in the UK and internationally, is the lack of collaboration and joined up thinking.
Of course, we might have “competitors” that work with similar clients or on similar projects, but we deeply believe that there is space for many to make a real difference by working together. The key to helping young entrepreneurs navigate the startup landscape (and to do it sustainably) is to seek out partnerships and focus on what brings the most collective value.
Gren Paull, CEO of Intelligent Lilli
At Lilli, we have truly understood what the problem is we are trying to solve, and by focusing on that, we have been able to create the technology that is going to help – something that a lot of our competitors haven’t quite done yet. They are still using reactive models and are less driven by the long-term beneficial outcomes for the practitioners in social and healthcare and their service-users and their families, with many of the solutions in the market are more focused on symptomatic solutions that provide alerts or data after the fact. For us, we see innovators taking bold new approaches in the sector as a positive thing as this will bring about lasting change and we think that bringing proactive solutions to the market will be the future in real preventative health and social care.
Ali Hamriti, CEO and Co-Founder of Rollee
Competition can be a driver for achieving excellence. We stay focussed on our vision and solve the challenges one by one. We care about the type of company we want to be, with its own values and impact, without following any others moves on the market.
Rob Straathof, CEO of Liberis
Businesses working in the same area should always be respectful of each other. It’s important to remember that your competition is trying to make their company succeed by working hard and working smartly.
Don’t speak negatively about them! At one point, you may be in a winning position over them, but as technological innovation can rapidly advance, you might find yourself working for the competition at some point!
Focus on your priorities and product improvements, deliver the best product to the market, and you will win all the right battles.
William Cowell de Gruchy, CEO and Founder, Infogrid
We exist because we want to ensure every single building on this planet is a smart one, and measuring the impact of buildings on the planet is the first step to reducing CO2 emissions. The more companies that help drive this forward the better.
I don’t see competition as a zero-sum game and as Baz Luhrmann sang in the song “Everyone’s free to wear suncream”: Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and in the end, it’s only with yourself.