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Founder Research Questions

AI, Competitive Uncertainty, and Internationalisation Decisions

Central Research Question (CRQ): How do early-stage startup founders make sense of internationalisation decisions when AI reshapes the competitive dynamics on which those decisions traditionally rest?

Interviewee Name

Startup Name

Part 1: The Business and the Role of AI

Q1. Role of AI in the business
What role, if any, has AI played in how your business operates day to day? And when you think about competing against larger, more established companies internationally, how do you see your position?

Q2. Sources of competitive advantage
Where do you feel your main competitive advantages come from?

Follow-up: Where, if anywhere, do AI tools fit into that?

Q3. Access to AI tools and skills
Do the AI tools available to you feel equally available to your competitors? And how do you think about the skills and capabilities your team needs, where does AI come into that, if at all?

Part 2: Competition, Speed, and Uncertainty

Q4. Market speed and imitation
How quickly does your market shift? Have you experienced situations where you launched something and then saw a competitor produce something very similar shortly after? What was that like for you?

Q5. Racing and pressure
Do you feel a sense of racing or pressure to move quickly in your market? Where does that pressure come from? Can you walk me through a moment when you felt genuinely uncertain about what to do next?

Q6. Living with uncertainty
Thinking back over the past year or so, what has felt most uncertain to you as a founder, and why?

Q7. Uncertainty and decisions
When you have faced that kind of uncertainty, how did it actually shape what you decided to do?

Part 3: Transition

Q8. From competition to growth
Given everything we have talked about, AI, the pace of competition, the uncertainty, how have these changes shaped the way you think about growing the business?

Part 4: Internationalisation

Q9. Internationalisation experience or intent
Has your company expanded, or seriously considered expanding, into a foreign market? Tell me about that: what prompted it, or what has held you back so far?

Q10. Choosing markets and modes
When you think about entering a foreign market, how would you decide which market to go to first and how to enter (for example, via partners, platforms, or hiring locally)? What would drive those choices?

Q11. AI and internationalisation risk
In what ways do your AI capability, or the wider competitive AI landscape, factor into whether, when, or how you would expand internationally? And what makes international expansion feel most risky or uncertain to you right now?

Additional Notes