The Aserto Strategy: When to Embrace Competition in Technical Categories

Competition in technical markets often terrifies founders. But what if competition could actually accelerate your category’s growth? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Omri Gazitt, founder of Aserto, shared a counterintuitive perspective on competition in emerging technical categories.

The Competition Paradox

When Aserto entered the cloud authorization space, they weren’t alone for long. “We’ve gone from zero when we first started to about ten companies that are doing roughly what we’re doing, which is a blessing and a curse,” Omri explains. But rather than viewing this as a threat, Aserto saw an opportunity for category validation.

Why Competition Matters in Technical Categories

The emergence of competitors has helped validate the market need. “The blessing part of it is that more and more people now know that there is a solution that they can kind of bring in as opposed to have to build it all themselves,” Omri notes. This collective market education reduces the burden on any single company to evangelize the category.

The Winner-Takes-Most Reality

However, Omri remains clear-eyed about the end game: “Software is typically a winner takes most type of endeavor. And so out of the ten or twelve companies that exist, probably one or two or three will remain.” This reality shapes how Aserto approaches competition and category building.

Learning from Database History

Aserto’s approach to competition draws from historical patterns in enterprise infrastructure. “I’m old enough to go back to the days of databases, pre-SQL and pre-ODBC,” Omri shares. “The database category didn’t really take off until you had a common language SQL… that basically standardized a lot of the language elements.”

The Standards Strategy

This historical perspective informs their approach to standards and competition. “You don’t want to kind of go in too early because pre-standardizing things before you actually have some market pull is dangerous,” Omri warns. “But for this to really grow as a category… we’ll have to go create some standards and then compete within those standard frameworks.”

Market Education Through Competition

Rather than trying to own the entire market narrative, Aserto focuses on specific customer segments where the pain is most acute:

• “B2B SaaS vendors that want to move from a coarse grained authentication model… to a fine grained authorization model”
• “Enterprises that want to create a common authorization control plane for a number of their internal applications”

This focused approach allows them to build depth in specific use cases while the broader category matures.

The Path to Category Leadership

Success in this environment requires a delicate balance. “Our vision is to basically be the enterprise control plane for authorization in the age of SaaS and Cloud,” Omri explains. The goal is reaching a point where “no one is confused about authorization as something that they have to go build on their own. In fact, they don’t want to because that means that their application is going to be a snowflake.”

For technical founders building new categories, Aserto’s approach offers valuable lessons. Rather than fighting competition, embrace its role in category validation and market education. Focus on building depth in specific use cases while contributing to the broader development of category standards. And remember that in technical markets, the emergence of competition often signals you’re onto something significant.

The key is timing: know when to compete on features and when to collaborate on standards. In emerging technical categories, sometimes your biggest competitor isn’t other startups—it’s the status quo of companies building everything themselves.