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and by substantial amounts of invested capital in formal amenities required by incumbent brands that are frequently cost centers rather than profit centers (lobby restaurant, room service, etc.). Image courtesy of Mint House Real estate lies at the core of our everyday lives?—?it it characterizes the space in which we live, the environment in which we work, and the places where we socialize. MORE
Airtable isn’t the only company in this collaboration space — incumbents have invested resources in “low-code” platforms, such as Google’s App Maker, Microsoft’s PowerApps, Dell’s Boomi, and Intuit’s Quick Base; other great products on the startup side include Superhuman, Notion, Front, Coda, and a few others. MORE
Incumbent client/server technologies have lost their market dominance to new incumbents. Last week, I participated in two discussions about the changes in the SaaS world. I believe they are fundamental. The most important force shaping the industry today is competition. The level of competition in many core SaaS segments is intense. The SaaS era is about 20 years old. Salesforce was founded in 1999. Since then, many major categories of software have been saasified. MORE
Conventional wisdom dictated that incumbents should focus their innovation efforts on R&D and growing their cash cows while investing in a few startups. The following is an excerpt from 500’s CVC report. How has corporate venture capital changed? In the decade since the Great Recession, we have seen digital upstarts – taking advantage of disruptive technologies from AI to IoT – reshape the economy and the corporate pecking order. MORE
So when Sam Rosen came to me with the idea of disrupting storage with a product that is priced cheaper than existing incumbents and he could build a product that is a better service I was intrigued. dominated by a few very large incumbents who control much of the distribution or are you going into a market that is “fragmented” where nobody controls the industry. Incumbent Strengths & Weaknesses. Many startup businesses – tech or otherwise – fail. MORE
Meanwhile, it’s incumbent on you as the CEO to create an environment that encourages action-oriented behavior. Contributed by Chen Amit , co-founder and CEO of Tipalti. Entrepreneurship is one of the most challenging vocations on earth. Even during the best of times, it requires long hours, endless devotion, and a willingness to take big risks and make gut-wrenching decisions. Today, as we navigate an unprecedented global health crisis , an entrepreneur’s role becomes even more demanding. MORE
We have reached a point in SaaS where a small fraction of an incumbent is a billion-dollar company. the industry has been looking for ways to compete with some of these incumbents for a long time. I suspect old-fashioned product marketing may be the disruptive force to prise $1 billion worth of market away from some of these incumbents. Salesforce is worth $113 billion. 1% of $113 billion is $1.13 billion. ServiceNow is worth $34B and Workday is worth $33B. MORE
As ecosystem builders, we are new entrants coping with well-entrenched incumbents who are well-motivated to hold their turf. To you, what is an Ecosystem Builder? We amplify the voice of the innovators and entrepreneurs, of small business and new ventures. All of them. ALL of them. In my world, there’s a great term “liaison-animateur” connectors who are professional, unselfish, enthusiastic, and proactive. Effective ecosystem builders are them? (Cf. MORE
Hello. It has been a while since I’ve posted here, nearly 3 months. My fingers are well-rested, but my writing prowess is likely rusty, so please forgive any rustiness in this post. I do plan to write a lot more this summer, so stay tuned. MORE
You can’t simply drop a bunch of electric scooters in a market and hope to compete with the data and software advantages of the incumbents. But perhaps one of the biggest overlooked advantage of the incumbents is just how massively complicated it is to run a global or even national or even city version of a transportation company. The Truth About the Scooter Economy?—?An MORE
Using the proliferation of newly GPS-enabled mobile devices to enable taxi hailing and beat out stagnant incumbent providers was always going to be a big win for consumers. It provided a better service than existing cabs were going to be able to do for at least several years—cutting out lots of unnecessary overhead in the system. Had it been built differently, it could have been a better company and honestly I’d like to believe maybe even a more valuable one in the long term. MORE
There are spaces where pricing innovation is welcome, especially when there is a large, expensive incumbent. Startups are innovation machines. They identify market opportunities, develop novel products and go out to change the world. Some companies want to change the world in one dimension: a better product or a disruptive go-to-market. Others want to innovate in every dimension and re-invent every discipline from pricing to marketing to support to customer success. MORE
The “incumbent provider” of English proficiency tests, Test Of English As A Foreign Language (aka TOEFL), has had all of the companies and universities who accept it locked up for many years. But in some markets, incumbency matters more than better. I wrote about our portfolio company Duolingo’s English Proficiency Test back in August of last year. MORE
Incumbents became increasingly annoyed with our successes in the country’s largest market – NYC – that they started even taking out ads against us. It’s no wonder incumbents don’t want us to exist. MakeSpace , the leading provider of next-generation storage for consumers, today announced an additional $17.5 MORE
Of course, startups often manage to find a way to take down incumbents and a distraction for Carta, at least, in the form of a very public gender discrimination lawsuit by a former VP of marketing, could be the kind of opening that Pulley needs. MORE
The thesis of the book is that incumbents in markets – especially large and well entrenched markets – seldom survive fundamental technology changes in their industries. It should affect how you think if you are an incumbent but also if you’re a startup. Let’s start with the incumbents position in a market. It is often the situation that the incumbent offers a product that is vastly superior in the market in terms of performance or functionality. MORE
Can you compete in a niche where incumbents don’t care or cannot move quickly? I won a fake stock market competition in elementary school. I put all my money in a few penny stocks — where prices are less than a dollar, and because of their small denomination, their value (as a percentage) fluctuates wildly. Some days I had the worst portfolio, other days I had the best. The competition happened to end on an up-day. This was an example of “high risk, high reward.” Like startups. MORE
And our competitors are not really each other but the incumbent businesses that have 99.9% ” In summary: The competitors are the incumbents. This morning Clutter.io announced they raised $9 million from Sequoia , arguably the best venture capital firm that exists. Congratulations. Sincerely. Conventional wisdom says I shouldn’t tell you this because I invested in their main competitor, MakeSpace. MORE
As all investors know from the case of Uber, you cannot size a market based on an incumbent. When investors ask about exit strategy, it’s often a way to gauge whether a founder understands the dynamic of the market, the well-capitalized incumbents who might be a threat, and a founder’s ability to reason on the spot. Getting investors excited about your product is a critical part of raising capital. MORE
Quarterly data from Gust, the online platform for the global angel investment industry, reveals that while incumbent leaders show no sign of slowing down, new industries and areas Read more >. In Q3 the global startup ecosystem continued to thrive, with 25% growth over the same quarter last year and up 18% from last quarter, as the innovation economy expands around the world. MORE
In just about all cases, to successfully disrupt a large incumbent, your best case scenario is that they completely ignore you and what you're doing. You want the incumbent to act "rationally", because an emotionally fired-up incumbent will come try to crush you simply out of spite and ego. The fact that what you have doesn't meet the needs of the existing customer-base is what makes it easier for the incumbent to ignore you. Working on a startup? MORE
It’s the company that pursues an incumbent with faster, better or cheaper solution and in particular a solution that cannibalizes the incumbent’s business model typically because of a lower cost structure. Zynga leveraged Facebook’s Open Connect platform to grow its casual gaming business much, much faster than incumbents Pogo and others. MORE
They have studied their market, talking to customers and doing competitive intelligence on incumbents. Nobody can predict the future. Everybody can tell you what’s possible. The art is in knowing what’s probable. I’ve spent the last 10 years investing in startups, half that time as a hobby and half that time as a career, and in that time I’ve learned that most people are scared, little aliens. Click to Tweet (can edit before sending): [link] ]. MORE
I love businesses that aim to massively reduce the costs of products or services in a way that makes a product or service vastly more accessibility and in which incumbents would have a hard time competing. I was speaking recently to the team at NuOrder , an LA-based company we’re an investor in about “realism in startups” — an impromptu talk I have given to any of our portfolio companies who ask. MORE
And incumbents desire as much of that as possible for themselves. Startups begin to siphon off important but underserved segments of SaaS incumbent's customer bases. Here are my 5 predictions for 2020. The direct listing becomes the standard way for startups to go public in 2020. The idea has been proven by Slack and Spotify, and many others will follow. Most startups at IPO have plenty of cash and don't need to raise more in the public markets. MORE
Then a large incumbent announced a new module that filled the same function as her product. #GiveFirst is a Techstars mantra. Simply put, it means giving—advice, resources, assistance, etc.—with with no expectation of getting anything specific back. When a network of people, such as a global community of entrepreneurs, live in a #GiveFirst way, each is helpful whenever they can be. This builds a powerful network of caring people, all flourishing because they are all giving to each other. MORE
But we seem to be in a calendrical renaissance, with incumbents like Google and Outlook getting smarter and smarter and newcomers like Calendly growing significantly. Over the past decade, many startups have tried (and many have failed) to rethink the way we schedule our meetings and calls. MORE
They’ll have to back up the truck for their best companies, take acquisitions off the table, and go right after the incumbents head-on. Speaking of acquisitions — many leaders of larger VC funds have privately given up on the incumbents buying their companies. Instead, they would prefer to back their winners to take on the incumbents head-on — hence, we have larger funds and longer hold periods to get liquidity. It’s an unusual time in the markets. MORE
“Forto has proven to be essential in a sector which is under increasing pressure amidst a global pandemic and is dominated by fragmented, non-digital incumbents,” added Michiel Kotting, partner at Northzone. MORE
And in all those cases, big old incumbents like ICC will try to find ways to slow down their new competitors.” For the past three years, UpCodes and its founders have been entangled in a copyright lawsuit filed by the International Code Council (ICC). MORE
FinTech - challenger banks, new electronic stock brokers, AI-powered investment advisors; startups are besieging the incumbents of this regulated world and assailing them in ever greater numbers. Which sectors see more startup company formation than others? The answer has changed quite a bit over the last 8 years. Some sectors have hit their apogee and are declining. Others have grown by more than 3x. Yet others are growing geometrically. Let’s take a look. Hot Spaces. MORE
The conventional wisdom is to wonder if these firms are getting too big — the counterargument is equally as valid, with technology seeping into every sector and spreading across the world, and with private markets bulging, new companies are able to raise enough capital where they can directly challenge and overtake incumbents rather than waiting for them to acquire them. MORE
Today, global energy corporation Equinor and startup Crux OCM are working together to test Crux OCM’s software, which functions as an “autopilot” for oil and gas control room operators. It’s early days yet, but if the Crux OCM solution works and scales, it will lead to efficiencies, cost savings, and new revenue opportunities for Equinor. MORE
Finding scant market demand from the incumbents whose owners prefer status quo, these startups start their own agency. In 2015, I wrote about the trade-off facing vertical SaaS companies. Vertical SaaS companies focus their efforts on a particular group of customers. Procore targets construction with their software and Veeva targets pharmaceuticals with their CRM. This concentration limits the market size, but improves product market fit. MORE
However, if you’re already an incumbent at a large health system with a compelling Covid-19 use case, then you’re in a really good spot. Earlier this month, Adam Dakin , Managing Director of Dreamit Healthtech, joined Phase2 Health to share his insight on how the pandemic is changing healthcare. MORE
Find out how incumbent products you are likely to replace are performing. To keep an organization safe, a CISO depends on as many as 50 to 100 different products. This presents a huge opportunity for startups. However, this means that a CISO sees a LOT of pitches in their role. MORE
Tim Holliday, a founding employee who is now the chairman, has been integral also to understanding what the company can use tech to tackle in terms of incumbency: he has a longstanding record as an executive in the industry. When it comes to using algorithms and other formulae to determine what kinds of services you might offer to specific customers and at what price, the insurance industry is one of the oldest in the book. MORE
incumbents Related Topics TechStars
MARCH 14, 2019
Today, global energy corporation Equinor and startup Crux OCM are working together to test Crux OCM’s software, which functions as an “autopilot” for oil and gas control room operators. It’s early days yet, but if the Crux OCM solution works and scales, it will lead to efficiencies, cost savings, and new revenue opportunities for Equinor.
OurCrowd
JULY 22, 2020
Challenger Banks Turn Up the Heat on Incumbents appeared first on OurCrowd Blog.
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500
OCTOBER 25, 2019
Conventional wisdom dictated that incumbents should focus their innovation efforts on R&D and growing their cash cows while investing in a few startups. The following is an excerpt from 500’s CVC report. How has corporate venture capital changed? In the decade since the Great Recession, we have seen digital upstarts – taking advantage of disruptive technologies from AI to IoT – reshape the economy and the corporate pecking order.
A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
APRIL 22, 2020
The “incumbent provider” of English proficiency tests, Test Of English As A Foreign Language (aka TOEFL), has had all of the companies and universities who accept it locked up for many years. But in some markets, incumbency matters more than better. I wrote about our portfolio company Duolingo’s English Proficiency Test back in August of last year.
Both Sides of the Table
NOVEMBER 4, 2010
The thesis of the book is that incumbents in markets – especially large and well entrenched markets – seldom survive fundamental technology changes in their industries. It should affect how you think if you are an incumbent but also if you’re a startup. Let’s start with the incumbents position in a market. It is often the situation that the incumbent offers a product that is vastly superior in the market in terms of performance or functionality.
Dream It
FEBRUARY 27, 2020
As all investors know from the case of Uber, you cannot size a market based on an incumbent. When investors ask about exit strategy, it’s often a way to gauge whether a founder understands the dynamic of the market, the well-capitalized incumbents who might be a threat, and a founder’s ability to reason on the spot. Getting investors excited about your product is a critical part of raising capital.
|
TechCrunch
NOVEMBER 17, 2020
“Forto has proven to be essential in a sector which is under increasing pressure amidst a global pandemic and is dominated by fragmented, non-digital incumbents,” added Michiel Kotting, partner at Northzone.
Entrepreneurs' Organization
JUNE 16, 2020
Meanwhile, it’s incumbent on you as the CEO to create an environment that encourages action-oriented behavior. Contributed by Chen Amit , co-founder and CEO of Tipalti. Entrepreneurship is one of the most challenging vocations on earth. Even during the best of times, it requires long hours, endless devotion, and a willingness to take big risks and make gut-wrenching decisions. Today, as we navigate an unprecedented global health crisis , an entrepreneur’s role becomes even more demanding.
Gust
OCTOBER 30, 2015
Quarterly data from Gust, the online platform for the global angel investment industry, reveals that while incumbent leaders show no sign of slowing down, new industries and areas Read more >. In Q3 the global startup ecosystem continued to thrive, with 25% growth over the same quarter last year and up 18% from last quarter, as the innovation economy expands around the world.
Dream It
JULY 24, 2020
Find out how incumbent products you are likely to replace are performing. To keep an organization safe, a CISO depends on as many as 50 to 100 different products. This presents a huge opportunity for startups. However, this means that a CISO sees a LOT of pitches in their role.
Both Sides of the Table
OCTOBER 22, 2015
And our competitors are not really each other but the incumbent businesses that have 99.9% ” In summary: The competitors are the incumbents. This morning Clutter.io announced they raised $9 million from Sequoia , arguably the best venture capital firm that exists. Congratulations. Sincerely. Conventional wisdom says I shouldn’t tell you this because I invested in their main competitor, MakeSpace.
|
This is going to be BIG.
MAY 13, 2019
Using the proliferation of newly GPS-enabled mobile devices to enable taxi hailing and beat out stagnant incumbent providers was always going to be a big win for consumers. It provided a better service than existing cabs were going to be able to do for at least several years—cutting out lots of unnecessary overhead in the system. Had it been built differently, it could have been a better company and honestly I’d like to believe maybe even a more valuable one in the long term.
Tomasz Tunguz
DECEMBER 18, 2019
And incumbents desire as much of that as possible for themselves. Startups begin to siphon off important but underserved segments of SaaS incumbent's customer bases. Here are my 5 predictions for 2020. The direct listing becomes the standard way for startups to go public in 2020. The idea has been proven by Slack and Spotify, and many others will follow. Most startups at IPO have plenty of cash and don't need to raise more in the public markets.
Both Sides of the Table
MARCH 25, 2016
So when Sam Rosen came to me with the idea of disrupting storage with a product that is priced cheaper than existing incumbents and he could build a product that is a better service I was intrigued. dominated by a few very large incumbents who control much of the distribution or are you going into a market that is “fragmented” where nobody controls the industry. Incumbent Strengths & Weaknesses. Many startup businesses – tech or otherwise – fail.
TechStars
MAY 16, 2019
Then a large incumbent announced a new module that filled the same function as her product. #GiveFirst is a Techstars mantra. Simply put, it means giving—advice, resources, assistance, etc.—with with no expectation of getting anything specific back. When a network of people, such as a global community of entrepreneurs, live in a #GiveFirst way, each is helpful whenever they can be. This builds a powerful network of caring people, all flourishing because they are all giving to each other.
Haystack
DECEMBER 26, 2018
They’ll have to back up the truck for their best companies, take acquisitions off the table, and go right after the incumbents head-on. Speaking of acquisitions — many leaders of larger VC funds have privately given up on the incumbents buying their companies. Instead, they would prefer to back their winners to take on the incumbents head-on — hence, we have larger funds and longer hold periods to get liquidity. It’s an unusual time in the markets.
Revolution
JUNE 10, 2019
and by substantial amounts of invested capital in formal amenities required by incumbent brands that are frequently cost centers rather than profit centers (lobby restaurant, room service, etc.). Image courtesy of Mint House Real estate lies at the core of our everyday lives?—?it it characterizes the space in which we live, the environment in which we work, and the places where we socialize.
Dream It
MAY 13, 2020
However, if you’re already an incumbent at a large health system with a compelling Covid-19 use case, then you’re in a really good spot. Earlier this month, Adam Dakin , Managing Director of Dreamit Healthtech, joined Phase2 Health to share his insight on how the pandemic is changing healthcare.
OnStartups
DECEMBER 22, 2015
In just about all cases, to successfully disrupt a large incumbent, your best case scenario is that they completely ignore you and what you're doing. You want the incumbent to act "rationally", because an emotionally fired-up incumbent will come try to crush you simply out of spite and ego. The fact that what you have doesn't meet the needs of the existing customer-base is what makes it easier for the incumbent to ignore you. Working on a startup?
Jason Calacanis
FEBRUARY 10, 2019
They have studied their market, talking to customers and doing competitive intelligence on incumbents. Nobody can predict the future. Everybody can tell you what’s possible. The art is in knowing what’s probable. I’ve spent the last 10 years investing in startups, half that time as a hobby and half that time as a career, and in that time I’ve learned that most people are scared, little aliens. Click to Tweet (can edit before sending): [link] ].
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 25, 2018
We have reached a point in SaaS where a small fraction of an incumbent is a billion-dollar company. the industry has been looking for ways to compete with some of these incumbents for a long time. I suspect old-fashioned product marketing may be the disruptive force to prise $1 billion worth of market away from some of these incumbents. Salesforce is worth $113 billion. 1% of $113 billion is $1.13 billion. ServiceNow is worth $34B and Workday is worth $33B.
Haystack
NOVEMBER 25, 2018
Airtable isn’t the only company in this collaboration space — incumbents have invested resources in “low-code” platforms, such as Google’s App Maker, Microsoft’s PowerApps, Dell’s Boomi, and Intuit’s Quick Base; other great products on the startup side include Superhuman, Notion, Front, Coda, and a few others.
Tomasz Tunguz
MAY 23, 2013
It’s the company that pursues an incumbent with faster, better or cheaper solution and in particular a solution that cannibalizes the incumbent’s business model typically because of a lower cost structure. Zynga leveraged Facebook’s Open Connect platform to grow its casual gaming business much, much faster than incumbents Pogo and others.
TechCrunch
OCTOBER 21, 2020
Of course, startups often manage to find a way to take down incumbents and a distraction for Carta, at least, in the form of a very public gender discrimination lawsuit by a former VP of marketing, could be the kind of opening that Pulley needs.
TechCrunch
NOVEMBER 16, 2020
And in all those cases, big old incumbents like ICC will try to find ways to slow down their new competitors.” For the past three years, UpCodes and its founders have been entangled in a copyright lawsuit filed by the International Code Council (ICC).
TechCrunch
NOVEMBER 2, 2020
Tim Holliday, a founding employee who is now the chairman, has been integral also to understanding what the company can use tech to tackle in terms of incumbency: he has a longstanding record as an executive in the industry. When it comes to using algorithms and other formulae to determine what kinds of services you might offer to specific customers and at what price, the insurance industry is one of the oldest in the book.
Ecosystem Builder Hub
JULY 1, 2020
As ecosystem builders, we are new entrants coping with well-entrenched incumbents who are well-motivated to hold their turf. To you, what is an Ecosystem Builder? We amplify the voice of the innovators and entrepreneurs, of small business and new ventures. All of them. ALL of them. In my world, there’s a great term “liaison-animateur” connectors who are professional, unselfish, enthusiastic, and proactive. Effective ecosystem builders are them? (Cf.
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 27, 2016
I love businesses that aim to massively reduce the costs of products or services in a way that makes a product or service vastly more accessibility and in which incumbents would have a hard time competing. I was speaking recently to the team at NuOrder , an LA-based company we’re an investor in about “realism in startups” — an impromptu talk I have given to any of our portfolio companies who ask.
Tomasz Tunguz
OCTOBER 21, 2017
Incumbent client/server technologies have lost their market dominance to new incumbents. Last week, I participated in two discussions about the changes in the SaaS world. I believe they are fundamental. The most important force shaping the industry today is competition. The level of competition in many core SaaS segments is intense. The SaaS era is about 20 years old. Salesforce was founded in 1999. Since then, many major categories of software have been saasified.
Haystack
JANUARY 24, 2019
The conventional wisdom is to wonder if these firms are getting too big — the counterargument is equally as valid, with technology seeping into every sector and spreading across the world, and with private markets bulging, new companies are able to raise enough capital where they can directly challenge and overtake incumbents rather than waiting for them to acquire them.
Tomasz Tunguz
FEBRUARY 19, 2019
There are spaces where pricing innovation is welcome, especially when there is a large, expensive incumbent. Startups are innovation machines. They identify market opportunities, develop novel products and go out to change the world. Some companies want to change the world in one dimension: a better product or a disruptive go-to-market. Others want to innovate in every dimension and re-invent every discipline from pricing to marketing to support to customer success.
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 8, 2019
FinTech - challenger banks, new electronic stock brokers, AI-powered investment advisors; startups are besieging the incumbents of this regulated world and assailing them in ever greater numbers. Which sectors see more startup company formation than others? The answer has changed quite a bit over the last 8 years. Some sectors have hit their apogee and are declining. Others have grown by more than 3x. Yet others are growing geometrically. Let’s take a look. Hot Spaces.
Haystack
MAY 4, 2019
Hello. It has been a while since I’ve posted here, nearly 3 months. My fingers are well-rested, but my writing prowess is likely rusty, so please forgive any rustiness in this post. I do plan to write a lot more this summer, so stay tuned.
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 18, 2019
You can’t simply drop a bunch of electric scooters in a market and hope to compete with the data and software advantages of the incumbents. But perhaps one of the biggest overlooked advantage of the incumbents is just how massively complicated it is to run a global or even national or even city version of a transportation company. The Truth About the Scooter Economy?—?An
Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 24, 2016
Incumbents became increasingly annoyed with our successes in the country’s largest market – NYC – that they started even taking out ads against us. It’s no wonder incumbents don’t want us to exist. MakeSpace , the leading provider of next-generation storage for consumers, today announced an additional $17.5
A Smart Bear
OCTOBER 8, 2019
Can you compete in a niche where incumbents don’t care or cannot move quickly? I won a fake stock market competition in elementary school. I put all my money in a few penny stocks — where prices are less than a dollar, and because of their small denomination, their value (as a percentage) fluctuates wildly. Some days I had the worst portfolio, other days I had the best. The competition happened to end on an up-day. This was an example of “high risk, high reward.” Like startups.
Tomasz Tunguz
JANUARY 17, 2019
Finding scant market demand from the incumbents whose owners prefer status quo, these startups start their own agency. In 2015, I wrote about the trade-off facing vertical SaaS companies. Vertical SaaS companies focus their efforts on a particular group of customers. Procore targets construction with their software and Veeva targets pharmaceuticals with their CRM. This concentration limits the market size, but improves product market fit.
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