By combining public and private strategies, the firm observes that public markets react more quickly to crises. This provides predictive insights into the slower-moving private markets, creating an informational edge to anticipate cycles and opportunities before they fully materialize.

Strategic leaks of "comparable companies" to media outlets are a key tool for stealth startups to signal their direction. Analysts can reverse-engineer a company's strategy, target market, and talent focus by scrutinizing these chosen comps. This turns PR into a powerful source of competitive intelligence.

While many investors hunt for pure monopolies, most tech markets naturally support a handful of large players in an oligopoly structure. Markets like payments (Stripe, Adyen, PayPal) demonstrate that multiple large, successful companies can coexist, a crucial distinction for market analysis and investment strategy.

Obsessing over creating a new market category is often a mistake. Data shows the vast majority of successful public tech companies compete within established categories. It's more effective to get "invited to the party" by using a known category label and then winning with a sharp, differentiated value proposition.

Stripe’s payments model shows how AI creates powerful data flywheels. Their massive, proprietary transaction dataset trains superior models, which improves the product, attracts more customers, and widens their data advantage, making it nearly impossible for new competitors to catch up.

Marketers can leverage AI browsers to automate competitive research. By opening tabs for multiple competitors, you can prompt the AI to instantly analyze and synthesize their pricing models, lead capture methods, and go-to-market strategies, replacing hours of manual work.

The venture capital paradigm has inverted. Historically, private companies traded at an "illiquidity discount" to their public counterparts. Now, for elite companies, there is an "access premium" where investors pay more for private shares due to scarcity and hype. This makes staying private longer more attractive.

The current market is unique in that a handful of private AI companies like OpenAI have an outsized, direct impact on the valuations of many public companies. This makes it essential for public market investors to deeply understand private market developments to make informed decisions.

Merge's founder considers taking competitor demos purely for research purposes to be unethical. Instead, she became a "really good stalker," finding all necessary information on YouTube, podcasts, and other public materials, maintaining integrity while enabling deep competitive analysis.