A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

AUGUST 11, 2021

So the existing incumbents are the defensive line. And they are not taking on any of the incumbents directly. It is also hard to take on the existing social nets. Why would someone with a million followers on Instagram or TikTok or Twitter leave those behind for a new social net? They look impenetrable. Until they aren’t.

incumbents 363

incumbents communities networking opportunity 363

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 7, 2024

” If no major incumbent can acquire a smaller company for fear of antitrust, all the incumbents can breathe : they can decide to build an a competing product with less risk of being outmaneuvered. The other major technology companies are just as hamstrung.

innovation 88

innovation incumbents technology ventures 88

Founders Coop

SEPTEMBER 30, 2024

LLMs are compute and energy hogs, and renting state of the art bundles of compute and energy by the millisecond is what tech incumbents do best. Will selling AI tools to incumbents prove more valuable than “full-stack” competitive attacks? So what’s a founder to do? No one really knows, and that’s what makes it interesting.

VC 143

VC innovation incumbents energy 143

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.

pitching 286

pitching incumbents transportation strategy 286

This is going to be BIG.

AUGUST 23, 2023

Is it too hard to unseat entrenched incumbents? Ask specifically what terrible things about startups in this space the VC is trying to avoid. Are the consumers not deep-pocketed enough? and do you have the revenue traction to prove otherwise?) And do you have customer wins to show that you’re doing that.)

incumbents 370

incumbents VC pitching investment 370

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. 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.

venture capital 204

venture capital capital ventures incumbents 204

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. It is two sides of the same coin. It costs less ($49 vs $205).

incumbents 192

incumbents education investing investment 192

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.

incumbents 376

incumbents disruption frameworks innovation 376

TechCrunch

JANUARY 25, 2021

For the fourth straight year, the publicly traded fintechs massively outperformed the incumbent financial services providers as well as every mainstream stock index. For the fourth straight year, the publicly traded fintechs massively outperformed the incumbent financial services providers as well as every mainstream stock index.

incumbents 139

incumbents accelerator finance financing 139

Tomasz Tunguz

JULY 11, 2024

But for the first time since Slack started offering billing on active seats , new pricing models provide a strategic option to startups looking to compete with incumbents. Perhaps usage or performance pricing will be the catalyst for a new era of upstarts displacing incumbents.

SaaS 88

SaaS incumbents disruption education 88

Tomasz Tunguz

OCTOBER 28, 2024

We discussed some of the potential reasons : the lack of immediate cost cutting, the desire of the incumbents to retain that data for their own revenue. In the future, most data will be vectorized as AI permeates our workflows. Enterprise adoption of Iceberg is slower than expected.

incumbents 74

incumbents disruption collaboration enablement 74

Entrepreneur's Handbook

APRIL 11, 2022

Even when startups get big, it doesn’t mean they’re safe from their competition. Continue reading on Entrepreneur's Handbook ».

incumbents 52

incumbents strategy founder startup 52

Entrepreneurs' Organization

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Others may call this dichotomy digital versus physical, the disruptor mindset versus the incumbent mindset, start-up world versus Fortune 500, or tech culture versus industrial culture. Amid the insistent drumbeat of digital transformation, those traditional, old-fashioned competencies are easily overlooked and underappreciated.

incumbents 239

incumbents culture leadership innovation 239

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 disruption SaaS 106

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. Outperforming incumbents with modern experience and digital infrastructure. Monzo has also been able to move faster than incumbents because of its forward-looking approach to building banking infrastructure.

peer-to-peer 103

peer-to-peer incumbents finance financing 103

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. That bigger market picture has also meant a surge of many neobanks, and so Starling competes with more than just the incumbents. billion) post-money.

incumbents 110

incumbents investing investment innovation 110

Tomasz Tunguz

JULY 24, 2024

Customers & startups will benefit from this intense competition with better models, cheaper inference costs, & faster innovation as the incumbents spend their massive balance sheets to exert the greatest AI gravity. History will rhyme with AI.

incumbents 99

incumbents strategy innovation development 99

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 28, 2024

For new entrants looking to take advantage of the advent of LLMs and disrupt the status quo by going upstream of these incumbents, we’ve done a deep dive into Bloomberg, Morningstar, and Verisk’s stories. In doing so, each built the beginnings of what are now category-defining businesses.

incumbents 126

incumbents disruption networking collaboration 126

TechCrunch

AUGUST 10, 2021

Lisa Dolan, managing director at Link Ventures, said she found the company while examining web traffic data, where Breeze was listed among industry incumbents among consumers searching for disability. Northwestern Mutual Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, M25, Fiat Ventures and Invest Nebraska also participated in the financing.

incumbents 99

incumbents health education ventures 99

TechCrunch

JANUARY 17, 2023

Startups often fall into the trap of writing off incumbents as too big to act, too clueless to know what customers want and too incompetent to deliver good products. Your company could very easily be put out of business if an incumbent adds your product as a feature of theirs. The market size for this feature is too small.

incumbents 98

incumbents VC venture capital advice 98

TechCrunch

JUNE 9, 2022

” The problem that Basebase is addressing is one that is endemic to the financial services industry: incumbent big banks and others have been building digital services for forty years at this point. We want to be closer to companies’ larger digital transformation programs.”

incumbents 78

incumbents leadership disruption strategy 78

TechCrunch

SEPTEMBER 12, 2022

But incumbents like Stripe and Adyen already dominate distribution channels, and they can easily extend a one-click solution. So if one-click checkout startups are struggling to make headway against incumbents in the single-currency, highly digitized and concentrated U.S.

incumbents 88

incumbents startup networking investing 88

Andreessen Horowitz

AUGUST 30, 2023

There are really three investable opportunities in the category of “known knowns”: Sell software to incumbents Compete with incumbents, with generative AI at the core Buy incumbents and remake them with AI—what a “generative AI” KKR would be doing Think about Rocket Mortgage, with thousands of mortgage brokers and 2022 net revenues of $5.8

opportunity 91

opportunity incumbents financing finance 91

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

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.

incumbents 106

incumbents accelerator technology startup 106

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

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

Discount airlines, cell phones (not smartphones) and integrated circuits are good examples of the “faster, cheaper, simpler” variety, because they simply displaced familiar incumbents. People tend to think that category creation is less risky than incumbent disruption.

strategy 95

strategy incumbents VC disruption 95

TechCrunch

SEPTEMBER 30, 2022

For Clarisse Lam , associate at New Alpha Asset Management , this makes sense: “The repricing represents a great opportunity for incumbents to make strategic acquisitions and accelerate their digital transformation. ” VC money is definitely drying up for some, such as neo-insurers whose unit economics are under scrutiny.

peer-to-peer 76

peer-to-peer incumbents pitching ventures 76

Tomasz Tunguz

MARCH 30, 2023

Incumbents have seized the moment with Microsoft, Adobe, & others integrating generative AI into their products quickest. As generative AI captivates Startupland, startups will do what they have always done: integrate new technology to build transformative businesses. In response, startups must develop moats to stake out their market.

incumbents 119

incumbents innovation board technology 119

TechCrunch

JANUARY 7, 2021

It will be interesting to see how newer entrants in the SaaS banking-platform space disrupt what are, effectively, becoming incumbents in their own right: Mambu is now approaching 10 years old (it was founded in 2011). That could lead to consolidation, too. Thought Machine nabs $83M for a cloud-based platform that powers banking services.

SaaS 126

SaaS incumbents opportunity disruption 126

TechCrunch

JANUARY 22, 2021

The key purpose of being end-to-end is to deliver an even better value proposition to consumers relative to incumbent alternatives. Incumbents in these industries are very large and entrenched, but they are legacy players, making them slow to adopt new technology.

real estate 144

real estate incumbents health disruption 144

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

TechCrunch

MAY 3, 2022

Will an incumbent copy us and destroy us? If you have a number of incumbents in your space, do some research and see how they have reacted to other startups. If the incumbents are routinely stealing innovations, invest more in patents and set some money aside for lawyers. If they tend to acquire them, great.

incumbents 100

incumbents development startup founder innovation 100

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 12, 2023

When it comes to purchasing AI solutions specifically, some organizations have a predisposition to buying from larger incumbents, so be sure to have a crisp value proposition for why they should partner with a startup over a larger incumbent with whom they’re already working.

incumbents 114

incumbents health frameworks strategy 114

TechCrunch

JUNE 9, 2022

One advantage for Klar, according to Möller , is that its “cost to serve a user” is about 1/20 of what the incumbents pay. I tie it back to complacency from the incumbents. Maybe there was less complacency by the incumbents or there was more competition amongst them….But They just happened to be reserved for a very few.

incumbents 97

incumbents opportunity financing finance 97

TechCrunch

SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

” Going up against incumbents. Third-party providers, mostly fintechs, have tried to capture some market share from these incumbents. Whereas the incumbents mostly focus on USSD (although there are provisions to use applications), Wave is solely app-based. Wave, however , wants to disrupt it.

investing 124

investing investment incumbents networking 124

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. The round was also joined by SEEDS Capital and Masik Enterprises. The funding will be used to develop Equatorial Space Systems’s Dorado commercial-sounding rocket family.

incumbents 80

incumbents VC sustainability technology 80