Compete Anyway When Giants Loom

Three years ago, an investor passed on ElevenLabs at a $100M valuation.

Today, that decision reads like a case study in how founders and funds can talk themselves out of the obvious: when a market is big enough that the giants “could do it too,” that’s not a reason to run. That’s the signal flare that the opportunity is real.

We keep treating big players like a “market captured” sign.

Most of the time, it’s the opposite.

If OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, Grok, or any other heavyweight might build what you’re building, that doesn’t mean you’re dead on arrival. It means demand is loud enough that everyone can hear it. The question isn’t “will they build it?” The question is “will they build it the way customers actually want, with the focus and speed you can bring?”

I once met with an old friend, a startup CEO, who told me it’s basically impossible to compete with the Big 4 in AI. His take was simple: they’ll throw so much money at the problem that everyone else gets crushed, and if you start on their APIs they’ll eventually fold your feature into the platform anyway.

I understood what he meant. And then he said the quieter part out loud: building anything technically hard is hard, and maybe I wasn’t smart enough to compete in a market like that even with capital.

That one landed.

Because it exposed something I think we all bump into, especially when we ask for advice: sometimes people answer from a place of safety. Not malice. Just self-protection. A way of saying, “I can’t see a path, so there must not be one.”

But founders don’t win by collecting “why nots.” They win by finding “why yes,” then choosing combat.

ElevenLabs chose combat.

They didn’t win by pretending big competition didn’t exist. They won by out-executing, out-focusing, and building a product that people actually loved. The giants being able to do it didn’t invalidate the opportunity. It validated it.

So here’s my call to arms: stop letting fear of theoretical future competition decide what you build.

Compete anyway.

And if you’re building something that could threaten the big investment-backed incumbents, good. That doesn’t mean the market is locked up. It means the market is still hungry.

One more thing I’m convinced of: if the people warning you “don’t do it” believed they had an edge for even a second, they’d do the exact thing they’re advising you not to do. Immediately.

Navigating the Land of Giants

When you decide to compete with an incumbent, the hardest battle isn't usually the technical one—it's the psychological one. You will face a chorus of "no" from investors who want safety and friends who want you to be realistic. The reality is that "safe" bets in startups are usually the most dangerous because they are crowded with people who are also playing it safe.

Define your "Anti-Feature"

Big companies are defined by what they must do: serve everyone, maintain legacy compatibility, and move slowly to avoid breaking things. Your advantage lies in what you refuse to do. If the giant has to support enterprise legacy protocols, you win by being purely modern. If they have to be general-purpose, you win by being ruthlessly specific. Define the feature or customer segment you will actively ignore. That constraint is your speed.

The trap of "Feature Parity"

Do not try to catch up. If you chase feature parity with a product that has been in development for ten years, you have already lost. Instead, find the "wedge"—the single workflow that users hate in the incumbent product—and make it magical. ElevenLabs didn't try to build a full voice assistant; they just made the voice sound human. That single wedge cracked the market open.

Signs of traction

You know you are winning when customers start switching despite the feature gaps. When a user tells you, "I know you don't have SSO yet, but your core workflow saves me two hours a day, so we'll deal with it," you have found blood. That is the signal to double down, not to panic about what you're missing.