Charles HudsonFounder and Managing Partner, Precursor Ventures

Never Compete with a Shark in the Ocean #ai #tech #siliconvalley #venturecapital

2 Mar 2025 · 1 min

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Charles Hudson advises founders not to compete directly with very large tech companies in their core domains — "never compete with a shark in the ocean." He contrasts feature-level copying (e.g., Facebook copying Snapchat Stories) with attempts to displace a platform (Google search), noting Google historically repelled competitors until recent AI entrants like Perplexity and ChatGPT posed meaningful threats.

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And the question is, how do you know if your Snapchat? And you're like, we have stories, but Facebook's going to copy stories, but it's not going to kill Snapchat versus the little featurettes that sometimes get crushed when a big company announces a new product capability. And my general rule of thumb is you never want to. As my friend used to say, you never want to compete with a shark in the ocean. You don't want to compete with a big company in their core domain. I think until very recently, it was nearly impossible to compete with Google and core Internet search. They effectively beat back everybody who attempted to do that. And Perplexity and chatgpt are probably the first real threats they faced.