OpenAI embraces the 'platform paradox' by selling API access to startups that compete directly with its own apps like ChatGPT. The strategy is to foster a broad ecosystem, believing that enabling competitors is necessary to avoid losing the platform race entirely.

To overcome the cold start problem in a network effects business, especially in a conservative industry like finance, a powerful strategy is to create a coalition or consortium model. By giving early adopters ownership and governance rights, you align incentives, build trust, and transform would-be competitors into enthusiastic evangelists for the new network.

Prepared realized it couldn't win against GovTech incumbents on their terms of sales relationships and lobbying. Their strategy was to fundamentally shift the competition. By offering a free, easy-to-use product, they forced the purchasing decision to be about technology quality, an arena where they could excel.

Intense competition forces companies to innovate their products and marketing more aggressively. This rivalry validates the market's potential, accelerates its growth, and ultimately benefits the entire ecosystem and its customers, rather than being a purely zero-sum game.

The long-standing relationship between PhonePe's co-founders, built on deep trust, allows them to be interchangeable in their roles. This enables one to step back during difficult periods while the other steps in, ensuring resilience through crises.

For data-less decisions, PhonePe's co-founders have a simple rule: the partner with deeper historical strength in that domain makes the final call. The other commits fully, and they never revisit the decision, ensuring they learn and move forward without blame.

Learning from Flipkart's constant catch-up cycles, PhonePe's founders rejected the scrappy MVP approach. They invested nine months upfront to build a payment stack capable of future scale, ensuring technology was never a blocker to business growth.

Contrary to a popular trend among Indian FinTechs, simply adding a lending product is not a surefire way to make money. PhonePe's CTO warns that lending is an extremely difficult business to get right and is globally known for causing startups to fail.

Stripe intentionally designed its Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) to be provider-agnostic, working with any payments processor and any AI agent. This strategic decision to build an open standard, rather than a proprietary product, aims to grow the entire agentic commerce ecosystem instead of creating a walled garden.