I think the "XYZ Big Corp might smash us" fear is a corollary to the "winner-take-all, and first-to-market wins" fear, which itself is a corollary to the "ideas

I think the "XYZ Big Corp might smash us" fear is a corollary to the "winner-take-all, and first-to-market wins" fear, which itself is a corollary to the "ideas are everything" paradigm. Needless to say, history does not bear this thinking out in the tech space. More than in almost any other industry, in technology, the best implementation for the right segment at the right time usually wins. That "right time" might mean first-to-market, but often it doesn't. Sometimes the market needs a first-mover to familiarize people with the concept and establish the pain points with that concept, which the second- or third-mover then perfects. As for XYZ Big Corp, it's true that they'll always have resource advantages. But they've also got resource disadvantages in the form of corporate politics, bureaucracy, prioritizations and allocations of capital and talent, and so forth. Plus, one should not underestimate the advantage that a handful of uberpassionate-bordering-on-obsessive, working-all-hours hackers will have over an equivalent handful of corporate clock-punchers assigned to a project.