Business is not a sport.

I’m glad we still have Jason Fried around to provide a healthy alternate perspective to the mindset of the rest of the tech industry.

Businesses love to compete. To beat, to win, to go 1–0. We don’t. I have no interest in competing with anyone. And we don’t frame internal decisions in a competitive way. Business has never been about competition for me.

All we have to do is get enough customers to make our business work. That’s it. That’s how we stay alive. Not by taking marketshare away from anyone, not by siphoning off users, not by spending gobs of cash to convince people to switch. We simply have our own economics to worry about, and if we get that right, we’re golden.

When you think of yourself as an alternative, rather than a competitor, you sidestep the grief, the comparison, the need to constantly measure up. Your costs are yours. Your business operates within its own set of requirements. Your reality is yours alone.

If I channel my former business partner, he would add that breweries have made a successful cottage industry not from competing but by collaborating. Competition is for competitions.