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The Uber that Never Was

This is going to be BIG.

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.

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End-to-end operators are the next generation of consumer business

TechCrunch

The key purpose of being end-to-end is to deliver an even better value proposition to consumers relative to incumbent alternatives. Back in 2014, Chris Dixon wrote a bit about this phenomenon in his post on “ Full stack startups.” The end-to-end approach makes the most sense when disrupting very large markets.

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Data-driven iteration helped China’s Genki Forest become a $6B beverage giant in 5 years

TechCrunch

Incumbent giants therefore could lose a sizable chunk of market share if a company could just manage to weave together China’s manufacturing proficiency and agility with the modern tech startup philosophy of “moving fast and breaking stuff.”. Tang would walk away with a few important lessons.

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How Our Journey with Snowflake Began

Tomasz Tunguz

It was March 2014. Here was a plucky group of founders with deep technical expertise seeking to take on the incumbents with a novel architecture. It’s a far cry from 20 people and sub-$100M valuation in 2014. The debate about partnering with Snowflake went back and forth during the investment committee meeting.

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Sequoia Heritage, Stripe and others invest $200M in African fintech Wave at $1.7B valuation

TechCrunch

Drew Durbin and Lincoln Quirk founded Sendwave in 2014 to offer little or no fee remittances from North America and Europe to select African and Asian countries. ” Going up against incumbents. Third-party providers, mostly fintechs, have tried to capture some market share from these incumbents.

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The Breakout Tech Company Of 2018

Haystack

As a little tradition on this blog, I’ve singled out companies starting in 2013 with Stripe ; there was Snap back in 2014; Slack in 2015; took a break in 2016, as I wasn’t inspired to select one then; and last year, 2017, was Coinbase.

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Sila banks $13M to offer single API for developing financial products, services

TechCrunch

It was acquired by BBVA in 2014 for $117 million and shuttered earlier this year. When Shamir was building Simple, he could see how challenging it was for incumbents to provide the tools developers need to embed financial services, and this is why we have confidence in his ability to win.”.