Can you compete with big companies?

If your company is small but you work with people who love what you do, you can move mountains. Even the biggest companies cannot compete with that 💪🏻

Have you ever worked at a big company? They are quite often, slow, dogmatic, risk-averse, and miopic. So it is possible to compete with them with a small team of talented people that want to reinvent the future.

Large companies are extremely slow moving and bureaucratic. Just to pass the idea along could take weeks to move up the chain scheduling meetings ect. nevermind getting to the point of creating a rip off. Often what they'll do is either A) try to buy you out at some point if they see you're gaining traction or B) be like Facebook and make a low quality rip off that doesn't end up working out anyway because its too late- see Lasso which is Facebooks copy of TikTok. Nobody likes a rip off and the best/first unique product to market will be able to get a foothold before anyone can rip it off. Ultimately, yes its worth it as long as you're focused on scaling up as (sustainably) quickly as possible

Well, it depends. I like to pick a market that's too small for the big players to care about.

This question can be answered by reading the book The innovator's dilemma.

I’d echo a lot of the previous comments with regard to the speed at which large companies move. Having worked for multiple large enterprises one thing that always jars with me is the amount of time it takes to get something out of the door. There are multiple reasons why; chain of command, bureaucracy, lack of resource (yup seriously this is a massive issue in large orgs), risk aversion, budgeting, brand dilution... just to name a few of the issues large companies come up against. As a small firm/startup you can have an idea, build it in a weekend and launch on the Monday. This is something much harder to do inside a large org for the same reasons as above. So in summary; yep you absolutely can compete.

The big players will move big, hence slow. You're on a speedboat.

In most cases it's not something to worry about. However if you know it's something a big company is already working on and you think they can do a better job than you, then I would avoid it or make sure I have a specific angle that will give me at least a niche. There are many examples of startups that disrupted incumbents while these were asleep, but there are also multiple examples of startups that were killed by a large company big launch or free product. One example I saw was a startup that was working on a super cool tool for Captcha and then Google announced free Captcha and killed them in months. In general, I think to myself: is this I'm doing something that I might do better than anyone else? And I'll go for it if the answer is yes, even if it's at the risk of getting competition from a large player.

I agree with most previous comments and I also would add that many large companies are too conservative, lack vision, have too many internal power struggles and are way too driven by appearence rather than substance. Finally, many lack the capacity to recruit, train and engage people towards innovation.

Time and time again projects and small companies prove this statement to not be accurate. I'm not exactly sure why this is the case. I suspect it's that larger companies have more diluted culture, less motivation and less ability to do dramatic change, or perhaps they're just out of touch. But by the time they want to copy you, you've probably already got traction. You don't always need the resources of a big company to make something great. A lot of projects are just not interesting to them or directly competing against them. Even in a narrow space your way of doing things could be such a dramatic change that they cannot just copy you: it would confuse their users way too much. For example: Gmail cannot change their client to a version of Superhuman overnight, even though they can afford to build one. And even if they could, they don't want to charge $30/mo for email.