>> you'll always be competing against the best, most well funded, smartest people in the room
What if your goal is for them to buy you out?
Don't compete, complement and start building the relationship from the beginning.
Plus, who wants to spend any time competing with the stongest contender anyway, especially to get started :)
There are much less expensive ways of playing the lottery than investing a year of you life into an unprofitable product that must be scaled to be successful, and only then hoping gets bought by a direct competitor.