To be fair, calling Snap, TikTok or Slack a startup is pushing the definition of a "start-up" a bit. This article _was_ written in 2018 when these were all smal

To be fair, calling Snap, TikTok or Slack a startup is pushing the definition of a "start-up" a bit. This article _was_ written in 2018 when these were all smaller, but even back then these weren't too small. Snapchat has been around since 2011, Slack has been around since 2013, and Musical.ly has been around since 2014. By 2018 they all had significant user bases; Musical.ly had been in acquisition talks with Facebook in 2016 [1], and was acquired for $1 billion by ByteDance in 2017 [5]. Snapchat had famously been offered $3 billion in 2013 by Facebook [2]. Slack was big enough to buy HipChat and Stride from Atlassian [3][4]. By 2018, I'd say these companies were already in a good position to compete with tech giants; but I wonder about the smaller startups. Say companies that have been founded in the past 5 years; have they had an unfairly hard time? Do they see any future where they can actually compete with a tech giant, and not just shoot for a buy-out? I don't have data on this, but I'd be curious to know how the trends have been shifting here. [1]: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/11/13/facebook-musically-acquisition-report/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/11/13/facebook-musical... [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/12/how-mark-zuckerberg-has-used-instagram-to-crush-evan-spiegels-snap.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/12/how-mark-zuckerberg-has-used... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipChat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipChat [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stride_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stride_(software) [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly