How to Talk About Your Competition
Without sounding like a jerk
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Being smart and being fast aren’t mutually exclusive. See why 30,000+ global companies (and me!) use Brex to spend smarter and move faster:
People try to avoid competition like the plague.
My kids watch five different shows about cartoon dogs who save the day.
All five shows seem to be doing great.
Competition actually means there’s an existing market opportunity. That there’s money to be made.
So, if you’re a founder, operator, or CFO in a competitive market, the real question isn’t “How do I eliminate competition?” It’s: “How do I talk about it without sounding petty, insecure, or delusional?” Let’s break it down.
Acknowledge That Competition Is a Good Thing
Know Your Stage, Know Your Voice
Differentiate Without Demonizing
Pick What you React to
Let the Competition Motivate, Not Distract
Play the Long Game (and the Partner Game)
Step 1: Acknowledge That Competition Is a Good Thing
It’s natural to feel threatened. But the existence of competition actually validates that you're not hallucinating a need. The pain is real. There’s money flowing. You’re not trying to convince people to buy your monthly subscription box for turtle meat. They’re already spending in the category. You just need to redirect the flow of funds.
Also, competition expands category awareness. Your competitor might be the first to explain the problem to a potential buyer. Sure, they might not buy from you today, but now they know the problem exists. You’ve earned the right to be in the consideration set when it is time. And that’s a win because a customer can’t buy from you if they’ve never heard from you.
At the last company I was CFO at, players in our ecosystem raised HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of dollars to solve a similar problem. They incinerated VC money to get the word out there. They couldn’t have been louder.
We sat there quietly, with a marketing budget that could barely buy Yeti mugs as giveaways at conferences, and rode their CAC into new accounts, letting them break down the barriers to awareness of the problem.
Step 2: Know Your Stage, Know Your Voice
Before you can talk about your competitors, you need to know where you sit in the market.
If you’re the incumbent, you speak from a position of strength. You emphasize scale, trust, breadth of services, and customer success stories. You’ve been to the rodeo. You’ve got the scars and the receipts (case studies) to prove it.
If you’re the upstart, you have a different superpower: speed. You move faster, ship faster, and build with today’s problems in mind, not legacy assumptions. Your edge is that you’re not bogged down by technical debt or 42-person sign-off flows.
This framing gives you a consistent voice. Because what sounds like confidence for an incumbent can sound like arrogance for a startup, and vice versa. The message matters, but so does who it’s coming from.
Step 3: Differentiate without Demonizing
Too many companies go negative too fast. They burn calories on takedown decks and competitor rebuttals, when they should be sharpening their own narrative.
David Lapter, CFO at Dashlane, nailed this:
“You don’t have to demonize your competitors to win, but you do have to differentiate.”
You don’t need ten talking points… just two or three that are honest, clear, and resonate with your audience. You’re not pitching a feature matrix. You’re telling a story.
Think:
“We’re developer-first, not CISO-first.”
“We’re product-led, not sales-heavy.”
“We’re built for teams of five, not five thousand.”
The key is to define yourself on your terms, not reactively based on what others say you lack. It’s okay if your competitors check different boxes. It’s not your job to chase them all. Speaking of that…
Step 4: Pick What you React to
If you look on your competitor’s website, they put their name, your name, and then all these check marks as to if you hit this or that feature. We’ve all seen the grids.
But then you go further down, and they're becoming highly specific. It's starts as “Saves all your passwords, can expand to teams of three to five.” Then it's like, “Likes dogs more than cats.” They're just adding things in. You're like, “Wait, wait, I like dogs too.” Suddenly you feel like you have to adapt your messaging to whatever they're labeling as the playing field.
But pause. Wait. Just be who you were before. It's okay if you have some overlap, but you don't have to just take their view of the competitive landscape and try to come up with some corollary to every single point.
In fact, if you try to go tit for tat, you’ve acquiesced into competing along the narrative lines they’ve set. Don’t walk into that trap.
Step 5: Let the Competition Motivate, Not Distract
Dashlane has a Slack channel where they share competitor news…. not to panic, but to stay sharp. It’s a gentle reminder: the other guys aren’t asleep. They’re iterating too.
This creates urgency, not anxiety. Think Olympic-level competition: you want to line up against the best. It pushes you to be excellent. And it reminds your team that coasting is not a strategy. Someone else is working as we speak to help customers solve the same problem. Someone else is writing the next great cartoon dog show.
Just be careful not to turn competitive awareness into whiplash. You don’t need to re-architect your roadmap because someone shipped a shiny new widget last week. Stay focused. Stay honest.
Step 6: Play the Long Game (and the Partner Game)
In tech, today’s competitor could be tomorrow’s partner. Or acquirer. Or co-member of a standards body lobbying Apple to reduce app store fees.
That’s why starting from a position of respect is not just classy, it’s strategic. As Lapter points out, you and your competitors probably have more in common than you think. You’re solving similar problems. You likely share end users. And when it comes to influencing giants like Google, there’s strength in numbers.
Competitors can be collaborators in shifting market norms. But if you’ve scorched every bridge by being petty or combative, good luck uniting the ecosystem later.
Also, OPEC worked for a reason.
Final Word: Focus on You, Not Them
Eliran Glazer, CFO at Monday.com, keeps it simple:
“You don’t have to name your competitor. You just have to explain what makes you unique.”
If your differentiation is real, it’ll come through. Show it through product usage, customer growth, and financial metrics. Let the user experience do the heavy lifting.
Because ultimately, the best competitive posture isn’t about them. It’s about you. If you’re doing things worth talking about, you won’t need to say much at all.
Run the Numbers Podcast
Apple | Spotify | YouTube
Guess who interviews award winning, national best selling authors? Apparently me.
In this episode, I’m joined by Jimmy Soni, bestselling author of The Founders, which chronicles the early years of PayPal.
The cofounders and early team members of PayPal went on to found or invest in major tech companies like Yelp, Palantir, YouTube, Facebook, SpaceX, X, LinkedIn, Affirm, Airbnb, and others.
Jimmy delves into some of the lesser-known aspects of PayPal's history. He sheds light on Peter Thiel's prediction of the dot-com collapse, why he advocated for the employment of Roelof Botha as CFO at the age of just 26, and his second-chance philosophy for hiring failures.
The conversation covers PayPal’s “frenemy relationship” with eBay, how they convinced their users to advocate for them, and pivotal moments that influenced their IPO and sale. Tune in for unique insights into one of the most important "seed funds" in tech history.
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Should I Push My Customers to Sign Longer Contracts?
TL:DR: Long-term contracts only create leverage if you’ve earned them.
We go through the pros and cons of long term contracts, and what you may be leaving on the table by locking up your customer for too long.
Quote I’ve Been Pondering
“And as short as two miles had come to seem to him over the course of his running career, it occurred to him now that two miles was an insurmountable distance to an infant, or a legless man, or a human cadaver for that matter. Einstein was right, he decided. It is all relative.”
-Again to Carthage by John L. Parker
Really great article and I 100% agree with you. If there wasn't any competition for the thing you are building, that is the #1 red flag in my opinion. The existence of competitors means the problem is real, the TAM is forming, and customers are spending.