Build the Wedge When Giants Loom

Three years ago, an investor passed on ElevenLabs at a $100M valuation.

Today, that decision reads like a case study in how founders and funds can talk themselves out of the obvious: when a market is big enough that the giants “could do it too,” that’s not a reason to run. That’s the signal flare that the opportunity is real.

We keep treating big players like a “market captured” sign.

Most of the time, it’s the opposite.

If OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, Grok, or any other heavyweight might build what you’re building, that doesn’t mean you’re dead on arrival. It means demand is loud enough that everyone can hear it. The question isn’t “will they build it?” The question is “will they build it the way customers actually want, with the focus and speed you can bring?”

I once met with an old friend, a startup CEO, who told me it’s basically impossible to compete with the Big 4 in AI. His take was simple: they’ll throw so much money at the problem that everyone else gets crushed, and if you start on their APIs they’ll eventually fold your feature into the platform anyway.

I understood what he meant. And then he said the quieter part out loud: building anything technically hard is hard, and maybe I wasn’t smart enough to compete in a market like that even with capital.

That one landed.

Because it exposed something I think we all bump into, especially when we ask for advice: sometimes people answer from a place of safety. Not malice. Just self-protection. A way of saying, “I can’t see a path, so there must not be one.”

But founders don’t win by collecting “why nots.” They win by finding “why yes,” then choosing combat.

ElevenLabs chose combat.

They didn’t win by pretending big competition didn’t exist. They won by out-executing, out-focusing, and building a product that people actually loved. The giants being able to do it didn’t invalidate the opportunity. It validated it.

So here’s my call to arms: stop letting fear of theoretical future competition decide what you build.

Compete anyway.

And if you’re building something that could threaten the big investment-backed incumbents, good. That doesn’t mean the market is locked up. It means the market is still hungry.

One more thing I’m convinced of: if the people warning you “don’t do it” believed they had an edge for even a second, they’d do the exact thing they’re advising you not to do. Immediately.