[echelon]

My worry in solving an existing problem in a novel way is that the incumbents can catch up faster than you can scale.

If I were to take on Netflix/Disney/Twitch with some new kind of video entertainment product, they'd have deep pockets to fund a competing offering.

The lever of equity might work to attract better talent, but only if you succeed. There's a lot of risk.

Scaling rapidly also means giving up control as you seek capital. It'd be hard to organically grow and go unnoticed.

[Timberwolf]

My experience working for the 800lb gorilla incumbent was that we didn't take competition seriously at all. Even stuff competitors did that would be trivial for us to replicate got put in the "not a priority" bucket. The few cases where we were forced to match a feature you were looking at a lead time measured in years, tending to infinity if it threatened the influence of a powerful department. And this is the reactive stuff. Forget actual innovation, other than a few toy projects that never escaped the lab!

However, this was justified: even the most promising-looking competitors tripped over their own bad assumptions long before becoming a threat. We saw plenty of novel ideas but they'd always be sunk by a failure to understand the basics of how our market worked - things like trying to put a complicated app with a thousand options at a point in the journey everyone is trying to simplify and time-optimise, etc.

If someone who knew the market well had gone at it seriously and solved hard problems rather than apply the usual hand-waving "tech! blockchain! magic!", by the time we'd noticed it would have been too late to respond. You'd hope more recent incumbents like Netflix or Twitch might be a bit more responsive, but corporate inertia can build up surprisingly quickly.