I get asked who our competitors are, and I have stopped giving a satisfying answer, because I do not think the question describes the situation we are actually in.
It is a reasonable question in a mature market. If a sector is fully formed, demand is roughly fixed and every customer one company wins is a customer another company lost. Zero sum. Compete hard.
Almost nothing I work in looks like that.
What the constraint actually is
Take any unorganised sector in India and list what is holding it back. You will find things like: no standard way of recording what happened, no reliable measurement, decisions made on memory and relationship rather than data, and a workforce doing skilled work with tools that make the skill harder to apply.
Now notice what is not on that list: another company doing it slightly better than you.
The binding constraint is that the sector does not yet function. In that situation a second serious company entering is not a threat. It is corroboration — evidence to every customer, every regulator, every bank, that this is a real category and not one vendor's enthusiasm. Categories get built by several people at once or they do not get built.
If a competitor's success damages you, you were probably fighting over a market. If a competitor's success helps you, you are building one.
What I would rather do with that energy
Competitive thinking consumes an enormous amount of a founder's attention, and most of it produces nothing. Watching someone else's pricing page. Reacting to their launch. Building a feature because they have it rather than because anyone asked.
The same hours spent on a partner produce something that compounds:
- A pilot partner who lets you deploy into their real operation and tells you the truth about what broke.
- An academic collaboration that gives you access to people who will interrogate your assumptions rather than flatter them.
- A distribution partner already trusted in a market it would take you years to earn your way into.
Every one of those is non-zero-sum. The partner is better off, we are better off, and the thing that gets built is better than either of us would have built alone.
This is not a soft position
I want to be clear that this is not a sentiment about everyone being friends. It is a view about where leverage is.
Collaboration is harder than competition, not easier. Competing requires only that you move fast. Collaborating requires that you be genuinely useful to someone who has their own priorities, their own constraints and no obligation to care about yours. You have to turn up repeatedly. You have to do what you said. You have to be the partner who makes their life easier, not the one who needs a case study.
Most partnerships fail for that reason, not because the logic was wrong.
Collective growth is a strategy, not a slogan
The phrase gets used loosely enough to have lost its meaning, so here is what I take it to mean concretely: the ecosystem being stronger is worth more to us than our relative position within it.
If the sectors we work in become better organised, better measured and better served — including by people who are not us — then there is more work, more capital, more talent and more reason for anyone to build here at all. Our share of a functioning category beats our dominance of one that never forms.
That is the bet. It is slower. I think it is correct.