To be precise there were two phases. Firefox came and beat MS IE first. Then a while later, Chrome came and beat Firefox. This is a completely different story

To be precise there were two phases. Firefox came and beat MS IE first. Then a while later, Chrome came and beat Firefox. This is a completely different story though. First of all, Chrome. Chrome is not a startup. It's a product launched by Google, one of the richest tech companies in the world (and given away for free because they didn't care about directly making money from it). What REALLY happened was it nearly killed off Firefox which was way way poorly funded. So this is irrelevant to this discussion where the topic is about "startups". Second, let's talk about Firefox. Firefox didn't really "beat" IE because they didn't really make much money out of it. Firefox was a very special case. It wasn't some startup which went against MS. It was a result of Netscape losing to MS, and then deciding to open source it while they're going out of business. This is not exactly the best scenario when you're building a startup, and even if we're arguing based purely on product (and not whether the company actually managed to extract value out of it), again it's irrelevant to this current thread because Firefox is NOT a "startup". Lastly, if you're looking at this type of rare occasion and hoping your startup will work out that way, then go ahead and do so, I don't care. I'm just saying there are way better ways to "beat" Google, Facebook, and Amazon. And that's by NOT trying to beat them.