All of the newly IPO’d tech companies (ZM, FSLY, MDB, WORK, OKTA, etc. have the same challenge. They are specializing in an area that one of the three tech giants has an offering in. It’s possible they can all get crushed. But the tech giants can’t be best-in-class at everything. So the question about the success of these new companies will come to a few factors.
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How fast can they grab the land: ZM is a great example of a company that through sheer luck has found themselves gobbling up users by the truckload, without increasing their marketing spend. If they can keep growing at this rate and gobble up enough users they gain an advantage.
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Is their area best run by a neutral third-party: OKTA is great example of service that is best provided by a third-party. Identity products are most trusted when they are run by platforms that has no horse in the race when it comes to a specific service.
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Transferability between giants: Fastly claims that this is an advantage, being able to use multiple cloud partners with a single edge CDN is an advantage. How strong of one, it remains to be seen. This might matter or it may not.
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Product innovation: If these companies can keep delivering feature updates and stay ahead of the competition from MS, AMZN, or GOOG then they stand a good chance of out-innovating the giants. Someone let me run through MS Teams the other day, it’s definitely inferior to Slack.
The long term survival of these indies comes down to a combination of all the above and of course some luck. Tech moves fast and as the Teradata story shows even mastering all of these may not be enough. Even LinkedIn was eventually bought by Microsoft, but they had a great run.