Hey Dave,

For us, the first goal is to determine where the differentiation lies: is it technology, business model or distribution? From there, we gather a competitor set and segment them between incumbent and emerging competitors. For incumbents, we assume that their business is relatively static and we benchmark against the novelty of the startups approach to differentiation and we value how much that differentiation will matter when selling the product/service. For emerging competitors, our expectation is that their business is more malleable and so we do our best to determine how differentiated the business is from the competitive set today but also where the level of defensibility is. That comes back to things like how much money have the others raise and from whom, do we have true IP that cannot be infringed on, and is our distribution advantage something that is due to the team itself or is it just first mover. All of that is ultimately combined to give us a perspective on how well positioned the company is. Hope that helps!