This site uses cookies to improve your experience. To help us insure we adhere to various privacy regulations, please select your country/region of residence. If you do not select a country, we will assume you are from the United States. Select your Cookie Settings or view our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Used for the proper function of the website
Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Strictly Necessary: Used for the proper function of the website
Performance/Analytics: Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
For starters – the co-founder of Clutter.io, Ari Mir, is a friend and 6 years ago I backed the first startup he co-founded with Ophir Tanz , GumGum. And our competitors are not really each other but the incumbent businesses that have 99.9% ” In summary: The competitors are the incumbents.
But founders are often so consumed with talking metrics, milestones achieved, or the capital they need that they sometimes forget to talk about their overarching vision for their startups. As all investors know from the case of Uber, you cannot size a market based on an incumbent.
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. Incumbent Strengths & Weaknesses. So if you are then I have to ask myself, “What are the incumbents going to do when you grow?”
Today a startup that is building tools to help incumbent address this challenge is announcing a round of funding on the back of a lot of demand for its services. “T hey are seeing the impact of the alternatives,” he said, with the migration away from the incumbents happening gradually. That’s a common thing.”
I’m a female founder. I don’t have a technical co-founder. These are all of the things I heard from a founder that I recently backed. So what about all of the above statements—things that founders widely hold to be true barriers to fundraising? Nearly half of the teams I’ve backed have female founders.
Incumbents can’t react. The reason that incumbents can’t react is that their revenue and defensibility are continued by serving the high-end of the market for which it would take too much time & money for any competitors to effectively challenge. .&# But for now feel free to read my short summary of the key principles.
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. It is two sides of the same coin. It costs less ($49 vs $205).
Contributed by Chen Amit , co-founder and CEO of Tipalti. In my time as the co-founder and CEO of my company, I’ve identified a few traits that are incredibly helpful for leadership teams to possess. Meanwhile, it’s incumbent on you as the CEO to create an environment that encourages action-oriented behavior.
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?
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.
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.”
4-year founder vesting is dead. For the fourth straight year, the publicly traded fintechs massively outperformed the incumbent financial services providers as well as every mainstream stock index. Jake Jolis is a partner at Matrix Partners and invests in seed and Series A technology companies including marketplaces and software.
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.
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.
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.
There’s a quick litmus-test conversation any early-stage VC will have with the founder and it’s one that you should be as prepared for as your elevator pitch. Founder: “$8–10 million” VC: “What’s your current burn rate?” Founder: “$250k / month.” Founder: “Um. Why are you raising so much?” Let me check my plan.”
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.”
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
CEO and co-founder Eugene Danilkis said it will be using the money to expand deeper in the 50 markets where it is already active, as well as focus more on specific regions like South America and Asia. The funding gives Mambu a post-money valuation of €1.7 billion (just over $2 billion at today’s rates), the company has confirmed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
We organize all of the trending information in your field so you don't have to. Join 24,000+ users and stay up to date on the latest articles your peers are reading.
You know about us, now we want to get to know you!
Let's personalize your content
Let's get even more personalized
We recognize your account from another site in our network, please click 'Send Email' below to continue with verifying your account and setting a password.
Let's personalize your content