Ignore what your competition is doing. Shortly after we launched Reddit, we found out about another social-news site, Digg. We realized that what your competitors do should be irrelevant. Stay focused on your own plans and strategy. More often than not, what can ruin a business isn't what a competitor does, but rather something that happens internally. When we started Hipmunk, a travel site, we were well aware of Kayak. We didn't focus on being better than them. We just set about creating what we thought would be the best travel search site. This single-minded focus can be applied to almost every venture on the Internet.
Thank you for the interview!