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I believe that this is called a 'free market'. Also, called 'underestimating your competition'. This common misconception that big companies are hide-bound din
by noir-york 11y ago
I believe that this is called a 'free market'. Also, called 'underestimating your competition'.
This common misconception that big companies are hide-bound dinosaurs is dangerous for any start up to hold. Most large companies are indeed oblivious, but some elephants - if you tweak them hard enough - turn around and stomp you.
Always respect your competition. Some of them may be smarter than you think.
- ams6110 11y agoYep the common idiom is "waking the sleeping giant" as often attributed to Yamamoto after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
- beat 11y agoSomething I've noted about the Silicon Valley startup mentality, and I'm seeing in this discussion, is a lack of understanding of just how difficult enterprise projects actually are. The attitude is often that big companies work so hard for so long and spend so much on projects and still have crap, that they must be lazy and stupid. This is not at all the case. The enterprise is full of smart, hardworking, determined people - as good as Silicon Valley - and they still wind up with crap and failure most of the time. That's not a reflection on the enterprise, that's a reflection on the difficulty of the problems the enterprise tackles. Like I told someone at a Silicon Valley enterprise/health meetup last year... if you saw a startup with $50M annual revenue, you'd think they're huge, right? I've worked on three different projects larger than that, and they're all small potatoes in their enterprises.