Comment by piva00

> In fact driving out competition is rarely the goal at all.

Driving out competition is definitely a goal, the further you can snowball that makes your company a much more attractive investment since your competition will be bleeding money, attrition is definitely used as a tactic by VCs when a startup gets traction. Hell, it's one of the arguments they use to run further rounds of investments to others "this startup is very well capitalised and the competition has 1/10th of their funds, investing elsewhere is a losing proposition".

> Instead the goal is usually to reduce the barrier to people trying the thing - especially when it is a developer API which you hope developers will incorporate into their product.

I thought we were talking about unicorns such as Uber, AirBnb, etc., not some dev startup packaging APIs to serve other startups which is a whole other incestuous industry.