This is going to be BIG.

AUGUST 23, 2023

Is it too hard to unseat entrenched incumbents? You just have to be knowledgeable enough about the space to be able to prove to them why your company will be that outlier—and frankly, most founders don’t know enough about their industry to understand how to explain all that. Are the consumers not deep-pocketed enough?

incumbents 369

incumbents VC pitching investing 369

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

As entrepreneurs many people are driven to solve their personal issues right in front of them, which leads a disproportionate number of founders to focus on: music, bars, restaurants, photos, etc. Mission Driven I also am looking for founders that are on a personal mission to solve a big problem. But really it’s something I look for.

incumbents 270

incumbents entrepreneurs education pitching 270

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2016

I was asked again in an LP meeting later in the week and then again at a founder breakfast gathering we hosted yesterday. I fall in love with both the founders and the concept. But frankly, if you’re honest, that’s the same exact situation every CEO/Founder often has with all of their team members, too. I fall in love.”

investing 254

investing investment incumbents culture 254

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 14, 2023

ABOUT MY FIRST 16 Our new video podcast series My First 16 features interviews with founders and CEOs of fintech companies about how they acquired their initial customers and the hard lessons they learned along the way. Seema: Like so many of our founders, you had the pain point yourself and decided to go tackle it head on.

incumbents 93

incumbents founder leadership advice 93

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

Many questioned whether it could survive under the fail whale, inevitable competition from Facebook, founder fighting, fights with 3rd-party developers let alone become a revolutionary business that could make money. When Fred Wilson funded Twitter I guarantee you it wasn’t obvious that it was a billion dollar idea. Far from it.

funders 362

funders culture incumbents technology 362

Hunter Walk

MARCH 3, 2025

Of course Screendoor has an eye towards new VCs with identities, backgrounds and networks which are ADDITIVE to the venture ecosystem to better serve founders, so while the structure of the playbook is duplicative, the people running the playbook aren’t – and that’s the key.

peer-to-peer 88

peer-to-peer VC investing investment 88

TechCrunch

APRIL 20, 2021

“Challenger” startups in banking and insurance have upended their industries, and picked up significant business, by building more customer-friendly tools and services — more personalized, easier to access and usually competitively priced — than those typically provided by their bigger, incumbent rivals.

incumbents 106

incumbents consulting SaaS disruption 106

Hunter Walk

MAY 17, 2024

It’s also not an accident that, upon stepping back from being Textio’s CEO, I’ve built a sizable exec coaching practice working largely with early stage founders. Are there specific paths/opportunities in AI that you believe startups are actually better qualified to take advantage of than incumbents? Why does this happen?

founder 110

founder startup coworking culture 110

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.

culture 302

culture incumbents enablement sustainability 302

TechCrunch

MARCH 8, 2021

Starling — which competes against incumbent banks, as well as other challengers like Monzo and Revolut — said it will be using the money to continue its growth. Digital banking has reached a tipping point,” said Anne Boden, founder and CEO of Starling Bank, in a statement. billion) post-money.

incumbents 110

incumbents investing investment innovation 110

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 17, 2017

I’ve been involved with several startups where a giant incumbent attacks you and tries to sue you out of existence. Every time I’ve been in this situation, I’ve talked with founders and said the simplest line, “We finally know we’re winning.” The first instinct is fear, then dread, then panic.

funders 254

funders innovation disruption incumbents 254

TechCrunch

JUNE 22, 2022

As incumbent banks embraced startups, investors leaned into novel ways to reduce friction and improve accuracy, increasing annual mortgage origination by nearly 40% compared to the last decade. There’s immense opportunity for similar gains in healthcare, but long-term success requires healthcare incumbents to truly commit to automation.

founder 92

founder incumbents frameworks opportunity 92

Revolution

MARCH 23, 2022

which is why we assembled a panel of founders paving the way for a more proactive future in their industries. Startups are a Sustainability Accelerant: Unlike industry incumbents with slower, more outdated frameworks, startups often build with sustainability at the forefront of their business?—?even

sustainability 246

sustainability startup energy incumbents 246

TechCrunch

SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

Four big-name backers jointly led the round — Sequoia Heritage, a private investment fund and a subsidiary of Sequoia; Founders Fund; payments upstart Stripe; and Ribbit Capital. ” Going up against incumbents. Third-party providers, mostly fintechs, have tried to capture some market share from these incumbents.

investing 124

investing investment incumbents networking 124

Dream It

MAY 13, 2020

Paul Martino, General Partner at Bullpen Capital, gave founders good advice on this during a recent discussion with Dreamit. According to Martino, “Any firms that are asking early-stage founders for liquidation preferences are so out of alignment with founders that it would probably not even make sense for them to be investing at that stage.”

health 195

health advice innovation incumbents 195

Founders Coop

SEPTEMBER 30, 2024

For years after the dotcom bubble burst, being a founder was weird and hard. For founders, the past fifteen years were a dizzying elevator ride from scarcity to abundance, with a final wild peak of absurdity. So what’s a founder to do? Will selling AI tools to incumbents prove more valuable than “full-stack” competitive attacks?

VC 143

VC innovation incumbents energy 143

TechCrunch

SEPTEMBER 30, 2022

At the forefront of these changes is Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao. The leader, commonly known as “CZ,” has managed to cultivate a celebrity status in the crypto space rivaled only by some of the space’s patron saints, including the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.

opportunity 93

opportunity founder incumbents strategy 93

TechCrunch

OCTOBER 27, 2021

After developing a network of telehealth, diagnostics and pharmacies for consumers, digital health company Truepill is targeting healthcare incumbents like health payers, providers and employer groups. The company’s “big focus is continuing the vision of transforming healthcare,” said Sid Viswanathan, president and co-founder of Truepill.

incumbents 98

incumbents health enablement venture capital 98

TechCrunch

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

David Friend is a serial entrepreneur, six-time founder, and the current co-founder and CEO of cloud storage company, Wasabi Technologies. Even if you’re growing quickly, not all founders want to set a valuation for their company. People tend to think that category creation is less risky than incumbent disruption.

strategy 95

strategy incumbents VC disruption 95

Entrepreneurs' Organization

OCTOBER 30, 2018

Co-founder of Owned Outcomes Krupa Srinivas explores the value of fear in an entrepreneur’s journey as she describes partnering with a US healthcare intermediary to solve the problem of cataloguing hospital supplies. Incumbent human processes were cumbersome, laborious, costly, slow and demoralizing.

innovation 152

innovation hospitality incumbents technology 152

TechCrunch

MAY 12, 2021

Cards have an estimated payments volume of $900 billion per year, and yet 95% of these transactions are being processed by local incumbents, asserts Pomelo. This is a problem the company’s founders experienced firsthand in previous roles, and are eager to solve by creating a new payments infrastructure. “We incumbents. “It

incumbents 107

incumbents financing finance ventures 107

TechCrunch

MARCH 16, 2021

“Our typical client is young — usually in their late twenties or thirties,” explains Ikigai co-founder Edgar de Picciotto. That was the first thing we knew we wanted to solve” “Banking can also be way too time-consuming, investing even more so,” adds Maurizio Kaiser, Ikigai’s other co-founder.

incumbents 109

incumbents consulting collaboration financing 109

TechCrunch

DECEMBER 8, 2020

He said that there were several major issues that led him and his co-founders to build a new search tool. He added that in addition to trust, he wants it to be built on kindness and facts, three worthy but difficult goals to achieve. For starters, he says that there is too much information and nobody can possibly process it all.

incumbents 141

incumbents networking innovation ventures 141

Y Combinator

DECEMBER 8, 2021

2 Incumbent banks miss the mark in two crucial areas: The banking experience has not evolved to match modern consumer. In 2015, Monzo founders Tom Blomfield, Jonas Templestein, Gary Dolman, Jason Bates, and Paul Rippon launched a digital finance platform with the slogan “Make Money Work For Everyone.” expectations. Their profit models.

peer-to-peer 102

peer-to-peer incumbents finance financing 102

TechCrunch

JANUARY 14, 2021

Sennder competes with large incumbents like Wincanton and CH Robinson, as well as other startups such as OnTrac and Instafreight. David Nothacker, CEO and co-founder of Sennder, said: “We are now an established industry player on equal terms with other more traditional sector pioneers, but have maintained our founding spirit.

incumbents 118

incumbents transportation sustainability finance 118

Revolution

JUNE 3, 2021

Post-Pandemic Geography: Predictions for Living, Working, & Traveling Post-Covid in America’s Startup Cities Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Announces that Airbnb Co-founder and CEO, Brian Chesky, will join Steve Case for the Tech Talent Tour Mainstage Discussion (Thursday, June 24th, 2021 at 12:00 PM ET).

startup 130

startup incumbents accelerator venture capital 130

TechCrunch

JULY 7, 2021

Avid Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, BoxGroup, Colle, Foundation Capital, Greycroft, and Max Levchin’s SciFi VC — as well as more than a dozen angels including founders of Plaid, Flexport, Marqeta, Bread, Albert, Addi, Lithic, and other fintech and logistics startups — also put money in the round.

founder 98

founder startup incumbents finance 98

TechCrunch

AUGUST 16, 2021

It used to be that if you were a fintech startup or, for lack of a better term, a digitally native financial services business, you might be eyeing an acquisition from an incumbent in the industry. But lately, fintech upstarts are the ones doing the acquiring. So what’s going on here?

incumbents 106

incumbents accelerator technology startup 106

TechCrunch

NOVEMBER 17, 2020

And this despite challenging trading conditions, which have forced companies to face significant capacity constraints and rate volatility,” explained co-founder Michael Wax, who co-leads the firm alongside co-founder Erik Muttersbach and Dr. Michael Ardelt.

capital 104

capital incumbents transportation sustainability 104

TechCrunch

JULY 13, 2022

Excepting breakouts like Anduril and Palantir , most contracts are awarded to incumbents — more than 95% of Booz Allen’s nearly $8 billion in revenue comes from government contracting — and any startup that gets a foot in the door has to bridge the gap between the R&D phase and the contract award.

ventures 93

ventures incumbents startup venture capital 93

TechCrunch

MAY 3, 2022

Whenever I talk about minimal viable products with product-driven startup founders, I often find myself in a frustrating conversation. In the world of lean startups, founders have to stay hyper-focused on figuring out how to fail as fast as possible. Will an incumbent copy us and destroy us? If they tend to acquire them, great.

incumbents 100

incumbents development startup founder innovation 100

AsiaTechDaily

MARCH 30, 2023

The company’s aim is to enable space access at greatly reduced risk, cost, and environmental impact compared to incumbent solutions. VC is a Singapore-based early-stage VC fund investing in technologies of the future and founders that create emergent industries with a global impact.

incumbents 98

incumbents VC sustainability technology 98

TechCrunch

JUNE 9, 2022

We want to double down on our go-to-market strategy, and to grow market share,” Jouk Pleiter, the founder and CEO of Backbase, said in an interview. ” There are a number of other companies that have identified these same problems faced by incumbents in the financial services industry.

incumbents 78

incumbents leadership disruption strategy 78

TechCrunch

SEPTEMBER 17, 2022

I caught up with Colin Walsh, the company’s chief executive and founder, to get an update. For me, there was a huge opportunity in a space that the incumbents were not able to capture because a lot of it is the economics of their model and misaligned incentives.The world continues to unfortunately be made up of haves and have nots….There

incumbents 123

incumbents sustainability capital health 123

TechCrunch

AUGUST 11, 2021

Lawrence Kosick is the co-founder of GetSetUp , the largest online learning community designed specifically for older adults. We see an emphasis on young founders (“40 Under 40”), innovative ideas and disruptive challenges to legacy brands, incumbent companies and “old” ways of thinking.

incumbents 101

incumbents peer-to-peer opportunity strategy 101

American Entrepreneurship

DECEMBER 20, 2024

Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy yet banks do not have their backs, says CEO and co-founder Sahill Poddar. The two co-founders leveraged their tech backgrounds to pursue an entrepreneurial opportunity. Incumbent methods systematically bias against women- and minority-owned businesses. and Canada.

finance 98

finance financing incumbents construction 98

TechCrunch

JULY 25, 2021

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.”. Finding a bigger wave to ride.

incumbents 129

incumbents networking entrepreneurs opportunity 129