Prompted by https://venki.dev/notes/love-your-competitors by Venki:

• My orientation to competitors (eg Kalshi and Polymarket for prediction markets, and now Lighthaven and Constellation and Frontier Tower for spaces) is pretty similar to what you describe here!
• Received startup wisdom: "startups die of suicide not murder" -- aka running out of steam is why a company fails, not being killed by competition. plan accordingly!

Positive-sum

• Marketing: For prediction markets specifically, the problem is roughly "nobody's ever heard of prediction markets" so we're pretty happy when eg Polymarket or Kalshi goes viral; it means more people experience what a prediction market is.
  • It also thus makes sense for them to sponsor Manifest as a joint endeavor to "make prediction markets cool".
• Inspiration: Oftentimes, a competitor is what inspired me to start my project:
  • PredictIt is what got me into prediction markets
  • Future Forum, EAG is what got me to make Manifest
  • Lighthaven, Constellation, The Commons is what got me to make Mox
  • And so I think it’s correct to feel some amount of gratitude for them, and also try and help them out/pay them back?
  • (FWIW, sometimes I’m inspired because the problem area is so important, but they’re dropping the ball, and I could do a better job. But that’s still inspiration!)
• Copying: On a feature-by-feature level, we often look at competitors and copy the best things they do. I sometimes think people are too proud and try to reinvent the wheel, when actually you should copy features liberally because a lot of brainsweat went into figuring out what a product feature should do. (or at least if you don't copy, try to understand the tradeoffs involved with their choices)

Alignment

• I often think "yeah I have 10 projects I want to do, so if some competitor copies me or just out-executes me, that's great, I can go do something else with my life, plus I now have thing I wanted without having to build it all myself"
• I love the thing where eg Elon gave away the EV patents for Tesla, or Volvo gave away the seatbelt patents
• I love the thing where a competitor sends you a cake when you launch a thing
  • When Rachel was pregnant with Ada, the Kalshi folks sent us the kid’s book “Dragons Love Tacos”