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).

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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.)

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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.

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Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 14, 2023

In this episode, a16z partner Seema Amble talks with co-founder and CEO of Mercury Immad Akhund about the idea of a minimum delightful product in fintech, doing the spreadsheet math on unit economics early on, and how to compete in a category already filled with incumbents. And does anyone care?

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Tomasz Tunguz

APRIL 6, 2022

As I’ve explored web3 I’ve been forming a mental model of the major innovations powering this enormous wave of innovation. At the moment, I see four clusters: A permanent ownership record that exists beyond and outside a company.

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Entrepreneurs' Organization

JUNE 16, 2020

Meanwhile, it’s incumbent on you as the CEO to create an environment that encourages action-oriented behavior. When conducting interviews, be sure to ask for specific examples of each candidate’s ability to act decisively; look for a quick, strategic mind that can develop and implement innovative solutions.

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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.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 24, 2016

Incumbents became increasingly annoyed with our successes in the country’s largest market – NYC – that they started even taking out ads against us. It’s no wonder incumbents don’t want us to exist. They have high-priced property and zero innovation. Little old us. Sound familiar? The Early Years.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

Incumbents launch products, VCs throw cash at other competitors, team members quit, the economy dips — whatever. When a founder is “mission driven” you get the sense that he or she will do whatever it takes to make an impact in the market they serve and will keep persevering whatever the startup trends of the month.

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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.

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2016

I love businesses that aim to massively reduce the costs of products or services in a way that makes a product or service vastly more accessibility and in which incumbents would have a hard time competing. Innovator’s Dilemma. I prefer to compete more with other startups than with giants. Mission driven, commercially focused.

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 4, 2015

Most customers won’t drive more than a few miles to a self storage unit making the incumbents essentially local retail businesses. So your tuxedo can be back in time for a wedding, your skis can arrive before your annual trip or you can swap out winter clothes as the flowers begin to bloom. The value prop is pretty clear.

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real estate startup disruption incumbents 364

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.

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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.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

They point out perceived market risks, they might question the management team’s experience, they might worry about regulatory risk or incumbent competitive powers. .” So other partners at the firm might sling mud at your ideas as you go for approval on an investment.

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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.

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Hunter Walk

FEBRUARY 23, 2024

The checks being cut to ‘owners’ of training data are creating a huge barrier to entry for challengers. If Google, OpenAI, and other large tech companies can establish a high enough cost, they implicitly prevent future competition. Not very Open.

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This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 21, 2021

We’ve seen studies on how men and women get asked different questions, but I also think it’s incumbent upon all founders to control the conversation. This is one of the biggest reason I think diverse founders lose out on funding—the unwillingness to talk big about the future and the laziness of VCs to ideate on the possible.

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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.

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peer-to-peer incumbents financing finance 103

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.

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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. When you first receive the threat it feels like the local pizza shop when they first get a call from the local mafia boss and you can feel the shake-down coming. The first instinct is fear, then dread, then panic.

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Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 18, 2019

You can’t simply drop a bunch of electric scooters in a market and hope to compete with the data and software advantages of the incumbents. But perhaps one of the biggest overlooked advantage of the incumbents is just how massively complicated it is to run a global or even national or even city version of a transportation company.

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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.

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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.

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TechCrunch

DECEMBER 8, 2020

He said he learned from working with Marc Benioff at Salesforce that you can make money and still build trust with the people buying your product.

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incumbents networking innovation ventures 141

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.

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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.

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Revolution

MARCH 23, 2022

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 even (and especially) as the company scales.

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TechCrunch

MARCH 16, 2021

On banking competitors, Ikigai’s founders argue that existing incumbents and challengers both have “significant” failings. . “It allows us to focus on what we are good at and really matters to our customers: the user experience” Challenger bank Starling adds investment service Wealthify to its in-app marketplace.

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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.

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TechCrunch

JANUARY 14, 2021

Sennder competes with large incumbents like Wincanton and CH Robinson, as well as other startups such as OnTrac and Instafreight. In June 2020 it merged with French competitor Everoad, and acquired Uber Freight’s European business last September. The European logistics and freight sector has a market size of $427 billion.

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incumbents transportation sustainability financing 118

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 28, 2018

So it’s incumbent on you to know what a smart business plan and use of cash looks like. they’re more often likely to tell you, “It’s not a great fit for us at the moment. We’d love to see you again when you have a little bit more traction.” That’s what’s called a “soft no.” Annoying, I know. But that’s the reality.

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A Smart Bear: Longform

FEBRUARY 25, 2024

A startup can beat a large, successful incumbent, if it does things the incumbent can not or will not do. Here are those things.

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Entrepreneurs' Organization

OCTOBER 30, 2018

Incumbent human processes were cumbersome, laborious, costly, slow and demoralizing. We used this type of expert knowledge to power our semantic engines. LESSON: Watch an expert solve a problem before you build a machine to attempt it. Other people had struggled on this journey.

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TechCrunch

JUNE 16, 2021

And while a new generation of “insurtech” startups have emerged in recent years that are bringing more modern processes into the equation, typically the incumbent major insurance companies — the ones that Tractable targets — have lacked the technology to improve that process.

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Tomasz Tunguz

MARCH 1, 2021

The architecture enables SaaS companies to reimagine the largest categories of software and rebuild them to challenge the incumbents. This worldview implies two important themes: The cloud data warehouse will become an increasingly central part of the SaaS stack, not just the data stack. Nor will this transition be immediate.

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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. incumbents. “It While the majority of transactions are still done in cash, there are still over a billion cards in the region. market with different dynamics.

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