What if you could spend 4 days locked in a cabin with the CEO of your competition?
I did. It was brutal. Then beautiful. Here’s what I learned.
I’ve written before about the Reboot CEO bootcamps. Five days in Colorado where a bunch of leader types get together to get some headspace and process the challenges of building companies. They’ve been life-changing for me. In October of 2015, I was amped to attend my 2nd bootcamp. Two weeks before, I received this email from Reboot:
Hey there [Matt]…in looking through the roster of attendees we realized that you will have a somewhat of a competitor in attendance. I wanted to give you a heads up in case this affects your decision to attend. As you know, we spend almost no time on business strategy and, in the past, when “competitors” were in attendance, folks found it useful to get to know the other person. That said, I wanted to give you a heads up about it. Let me know your thoughts or if it would be helpful to know the name of the other company. If so, I’d get their permission to share with you.
(And I’ve written that CEO a similar note.)
Thanks.
It turned out not to be simply ‘somewhat of a competitor.’ Rather, the CEO of the one company we viewed to be a fellow emergent leader in our space. Our one, primary, startup competitor.
You know what I’m talking about. That one company that makes you cringe when they have some splashy press. Who you resent because they’re always releasing some sweet feature you wish your team had thought of. That company or person that gets under your skin unlike any other. Yeah. That guy. He was coming to Bootcamp. My sacred place.
I emailed the Reboot CEO, Jerry, who is eternally patient with me. We had this exchange:
“He’s comfortable”? Oh god, I thought. Fuck this guy. I sure as hell wasn’t comfortable. But I damn well wasn’t going to show him that.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m in.”
Inside, I was crying a little already.
Neuroses and Touch Football
A little background on my personal neuroses might be helpful here.
In elementary school, I was the fat kid. At least, that’s how I perceived my experience. It felt like I was a social outcast for years. As I look back at photos, it seems I was just a little on the chubby side for 3rd through 4th grade. Well, nonetheless, an eternity for a 10-year-old.
I was the last picked for every sports team at recess. In Michigan elementary schools, recess sports are EVERYTHING.
I carry a concrete memory of science class when one of the ‘cool kids’ made a crack that I was like the Blue Whale we were studying because people hunted me for my blubber. Fuck me, kids are mean!
That rough patch of grade school was, of course, enough to lay a foundation for my life where I’d feel forever the outsider. Put me in any large peer group and, while I’ll look cool and collected on the outside, on the inside I’m probably feeling like that chubby fourth grader. (Who just wanted Sarah Balisi to like him. Damn was she cute.)
All to say I’ve carried into adulthood a general fear that others are cooler and have it all more figured out. As well as a sizable chip on my shoulder.
So, when I showed up at breakfast the first morning of bootcamp and my competitor (who I’ll call Jeff for the sake of this article) sat down next to me, I hated everything about him.
He was handsome.
And cool.
With a Captain America smile.
He’d shown up late in the night because he’d been in New York for some time-critical meetings.
“Why don’t I have time-critical meetings in New York more often,” I thought to myself. “This guy even has cooler travel needs than me.”
I was losing my shit. I was sitting there physically at breakfast, but in my head I was a thousand miles away. I immediately regretted deciding to attend.
In my mind, I was writing back to Jerry’s email from a few weeks prior, “Fuck you, Jerry! No I will not attend Bootcamp with a competitor and damn you for even asking.”
But at breakfast I stayed quiet. Like the chubby, silent fourth-grader waiting to be picked for the recess football game.
The Divulgence
By the time we finished breakfast and walked over to to our first session, I had steam coming out of my ears.
Now, here’s the problem with bootcamp. They have some voodoo magic that just makes you start talking about whatever is on your mind . Everyone sits in a circle. There’s some meditation. Sometimes Jim reads a poem. But mostly, there are a bunch of prompts and invitations to talk.
My other problem, besides sitting in a circle across from this Superman, was that I really believed in bootcamp. I really wanted to be there. To be open. To connect with these people. I decided I needed to share my angst openly. Even if it meant leaving. Or causing horrible awkwardness. I couldn’t sit with this stuff in my head all weekend.
During one of the check in times, when people were invited to share how the day was going so far, I raised my hand.
“I’m really struggling,” I said. “I don’t think most people in the room know this, but our companies are direct competitors.
A loud, collective gasp came from the 12 people sitting in the circle around me. From everyone but Jeff, of course, who was looking me right in the eye, from across the room, with a look of understanding and empathy written across his face.
“I thought it would be fine to be here together. But I’m having a really hard time,” I said.
For whatever reason, I went on to share openly about the insecurity Jeff’s presence was causing me. And about my lifelong struggle with not feeling good enough. Or like I fit in with the cool kids.
Everything that happened next took me completely by surprise.
The group responds.
Sharing my discomfort with the group allowed me to largely set it aside. It’s amazing how letting your fears, pains, and humanity into the open turns down the volume.
It’s also amazing to me how sharing our shit openly invites other people to open up about theirs.
We had a great conversation about our shared perils around competition.
Startup people are a weird breed. We all set out to build something meaningful. To avoid working for the man. To change the world. To leave our mark. Along the way, we pick a market and devise a business model. In doing so, we also (often unconsciously) choose our competitors. The funny thing is, as my experience in Colorado would show me, that while we end up often demonizing our competitors and their companies in our heads, those people are generally a whole lot like us. And our interests are generally more aligned than they are divergent.
All of this and more came up during our group conversation.
And Jeff was such a stud. At the end of the conversation, he walked across the circle and gave me a huge hug. “Let’s grab a walk later,” he said. “We clearly have a lot to discuss.”
During one of our breakout exercises, Jeff and I paired up for a walk.
A walk begins as foes and end as friends.
To be honest, while I was feeling better, having vented my angst, about sharing space with this competitor for a few days, I still wasn’t at ease thinking about spending one on one time with him.
But it happened.
I wish I could remember the full narrative of our conversation. I can’t.
Here’s what I do remember.
We talked mostly about our lives.
We had both grown with difficult father relationships. We’d both vowed to live differently than the models we’d been given. To become adults who deal with their shit. Who live lives of real connectedness and purpose.
We both prized our relationships with friends, with our partners, and with our teams.
We’d both traveled the world. Explored other cultures and ways of living. Tried to take the best back to our homes, families, and companies.
We also talked business.
We talked about the experience of going up against behemoth like Getty and Shutterstock. Funny enough, our shared excitement wasn’t so much about destroying those big bad guys but about the importance of building new companies and new communities where employees and users/customers had a more human and meaningful experience. I suddenly realized we were working on very similar missions, and the heart of those missions had little to do with digital image licensing.
By the end of our conversation, I felt I was walking through the field with someone very much like me. A human, facing many of the same challenges, experiences, struggles, and joys as me. Someone I wanted to support, encourage, and care for.
What a shift.
Some rare, first-hand learnings on competition
I had the opportunity to spend more time with Jeff throughout the weekend both one on one and as a part of the larger group conversations. The experience forever changed the way I think about competition. I’ll share some of the things that stuck with me in case they resonate with you, or assist in dealing with your own angst around the competitors you face.
Humanizing someone you’ve been demonizing is a powerful shift.
Whether it’s a competitor, someone on the other side of the political spectrum, or someone that’s simply rubbed you the wrong way in your first interaction, I’m always amazed at the power of learning someone’s story. Particularly, in this case, getting to spend time with Jeff talking through our pasts, families, dreams, and lives was profound for me.
We’re all dealing with the same shit, and we’re all better off sharing it openly and knowing one another in an authentic way.
I’ve written about this a lot. Something I deeply believe in. What the experience in Colorado showed me was the unique power of openness with people with whom you’d normally steer clear of speaking. How many of us ever have a chance or take the time to have a real, open, human conversation with our competitors? I believe the startup ecosystem would be a healthier, more human place to live and work if we took the risk of really knowing our rivals.
Moving away from a binary view on startup competition is freeing.
We run a marketplace business in an $8 Billion industry. We have over a thousand customers, the likes of Apple, Snapchat, Google, and Lyft. Trust me, I can spin a very compelling story that we are owning the shit out of this market.
But if I’m honest, the truth is I’m not sure it matters.
We are building a high impact, global, profit-generating engine that changes the lives of our photographers, our customers, and our employees. Along the way, we’ll generate millions of dollars for the world’s emergent photographers and for our investors.
But we don’t need to own the entire fucking market to do that. There’s not a whole lot of risk to us even in several other startups experiencing success in our space. Which brings me to my next thought.
If we’re really honest, our competitors are far from the greatest risk to the survival & success of our companies.
This was a big one for me. We spend so much time in startups thinking about, talking about, and fretting about competition. And generally, by ‘competition,’ we mean the other startup down the road that’s also trying to innovate in our market.
The reality, which sunk in for me partly through the time with my own ‘competitor’ in Colorado, was that the startup down the road is unlikely the macro threat to any of our businesses.
I believe Elon Musk once identified Tesla's biggest competitive threat to be gasoline-powered vehicles. If you believe their PR, that’s why they open sourced a lot of their technology.
For most of us building startups around the world, I think we’re in that same boat.
What’s more, in the midst of failing to disrupt the incumbent solution, most startups die along the way from internal cancers like cashflow issues, cultural breakdown, key employee attrition, and cofounder issues.
They may be the key to a step in our personal growth as leaders. I know that weekend in Colorado was for me.
To that end, I’m left wishing “Jeff,” and his team, every success. Thank you, my friend, for helping to reshape my understanding of competition forever.
