We all know the adage: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

As the CEO of a SAAS company serving a relatively basic daily need, creating online forms, I’ve always resisted the idea that founders must obsessively track their competitors’ moves—even when juggernauts like Google entered our arena. That same company, Google, just reportedly invested tens of billions in one of its biggest competitors, Anthropic , a move that seems to run contrary to my stance. But I think the takeaway is more nuanced.

In the AI era, it’s more important than ever for founders to fight the urge to doomscroll the competition. Here’s why.

Recognize, Don’t Fear, Your Rivals

Anthropic’s Claude and Google Gemini occupy different positions in the AI landscape. The former provides a ChatGPT-like assistant, coding support, enterprise workflow tools, and more. The latter is integrated across the broader Google ecosystem—Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc. In that sense, its reach is more expansive. But there is undoubtedly overlap. That’s why the heavy investment is a bold, if not risky, move.

But it appears to be less about eliminating rivals and more about maintaining a strong foothold in a fast-changing environment. It also acknowledges a larger truth: in tech and AI, competition will only intensify. Founders who want to stay relevant have to acknowledge their rivals without operating from a place of reactivity.

Most founders, of course, don’t have the capital to invest in their competitors. But they can remain competitive without panicking about the competition. Here’s how.

Laser-Focus On The Most Important Stakeholders

It’s a question that seems so simple, so rudimentary, and yet, so many new and mid-stage startups forget to ask it: What do your customers actually want? It can change the trajectory of your business.

Take Canva founder Melanie Perkins, who revolutionized the graphic design world, making it easy for anyone with an idea to create the visual assets to match it. Her idea was specifically to create an intuitive product for people who didn’t have expensive software and hadn’t spent years studying design . A laser focus on what her customers wanted helped grow Canva to what it is today—a $60 billion company , even with an influx of AI competitors.

Listen to customers. Figure out what they want and where their pain points are. AI-powered tools and agents make it easier than ever to collect that invaluable data—from forms integrating tools that analyze submissions and summarize customer feedback, to customer support agents that can observe and synthesize customer interactions.

Reliability Beats Fancy Updates

In 20 years of running my company, I’ve learned that there’s one thing that trumps anything else you can offer a customer: reliability. It’s more important than fancy add-ons or cultural cache; more impactful than the sleek branding or cutthroat pricing.

Founders can look no further than McDonald’s. If you saw the film The Founder , then you’re familiar with Ray Kroc, the entrepreneur who turned the fast food restaurant into a global franchise empire. His obsession with reliability—ensuring that every time a customer visited the “Golden Arches,” they could expect pretty much the same cheeseburgers and fries, anywhere around the world—drove the company’s success.

For founders, the takeaway is that racing to grow faster and offer more products than the competition shouldn’t be the goal. Instead, they should focus on perfecting the products they have and building sustainably scalable systems. They can work on standardizing the customer experience and creating feedback loops. Again, AI agents are a great way to automate continuously gathering insight on the customer experience .

Lean Hard Into Your Identity

In a time when ChatGPTisms are homogenizing writing and founders have round-the-clock access to what competitors are doing (and how they’re doing it), it’s easier than ever to sound and act the same. It’s more tempting than ever to imitate the competition. But to borrow a quote from Oscar Wilde, “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”

As the competition heats up, take a step back and spell out your identity as a company and brand. What makes you unique?

When Google threw its hat into our ring, it would have been foolish to attempt to imitate the strategy and design of one of the biggest tech companies in the world. We took a beat. We considered our identity, mission, and values. We were a bootstrapped company that set out to make our customers’ lives easier and to offer a user-friendly solution to a common workplace problem. We weren’t a cool kid startup capturing the tech headlines. In order to serve users, we didn’t need to. We leaned into our identity. We offered additional products and services only when we were confident that they would help our users even more.

That self-awareness ended up being a powerful edge for us.

Smart founders focus on things that competitors can’t easily copy: understanding their customers, being known as reliable, and sticking with their unique place in the ecosystem. I can also attest that when you stop obsessing about the competition, you give yourself the gift of releasing a lot of unnecessary stress. And that’s something that sets founders up for long-term success.