On Competition

It's funny as we refine the differentiating bits and pieces of our new business here at Vino Veritas and looking at our competition and how I feel about them.

I'm spectacularly happy that self-storage companies already out there are building out additional climate-controlled capacity at breakneck speeds, because our approach at VV is dramatically different.

And at the same time I'm learning to relish the competition, and enjoy thinking about just beating the pants off of 'em. That's the bit that gets me thinking about clarifying what I mean by beating the pants off our competitors.

First, there is no one (yet) that will compete with the combination of climate controlled storage needs, related services, and socially-enabled sharing of what's being physically stored by means of rich-internet application.

There's a very significant barrier-to-entry both in terms of limited numbers of people who can physically build these structures successfully and in terms of knowledge and skill sets required to pull off the services and RIA combination.

Second, I'm not the kind of competitor who is out there to drive our other competitors out of business. There's a huge pie out there, and quite frankly, we probably couldn't build enough underground storage in the next 10 years to put anyone out of business.

We might be able to encourage them to stick to their traditional above ground storage businesses, but at the end of the day, competition doesn't mean destroying other businesses offering similar services.

What healthy competition does mean is that we win market share by doing what we set out to do and doing it better than anyone else out there. (*and Hint: doing it better doesn't happen in a vacuum - it happens by experience and conversation).

Now there's a challenge we're ready for.