A Smart Bear » How startups beat incumbents⁠↗

Big companies are rarely well-oiled innovation machines, and it certainly doesn’t feel like you’re constantly outpacing the competition.

it’s a disadvantage to have a lot of customers when you want to innovate with your product, because no customer wakes up in the morning and says: Gee, I hope the software I’m accustomed to dramatically changes today.

But the reality is that startups often ignore the law, and that can be an edge. The way a startup wins, is to do things that incumbents cannot or will not do.

A startup who selects “apparently” low-ROI projects, will probably have no competition from incumbents.

At a big company, it’s safer to say “let’s gather more data” and “let’s wait for consensus” than it is to take a risk.

For an incumbent with hundreds of millions in revenue, that means the product line must have a good chance of making $50-$100 million, or they won’t even try (nor should they).

Given our size, we only see a few good things [to invest in]. If we were smaller, then we’d see lots of good things. —Warren Buffett.