
In Technology, Small Fish Almost Always Eat Big Fish - walterbell
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/technology-small-fish-almost-always-eat-big-fish
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paulsutter
Painfully close but wrong.

Big fish are almost always eaten by small fish. On the other hand, almost all
small fish fail. It's the rare exception among small fish that bests a big
fish. Stated correctly it sounds unremarkable because it is unremarkable. So
much for "Leslie's Law".

His DEC/IBM comparison shows that he somehow stopped reading the tech press
around 1990. Intel's decomposed platform ate them all and opened the door to
Linux and open source. Intel still dominates servers, but on the client side
has been bested by the system on a chip cpu designs licensed by the mobile
vendors. The two big client OSs are of course rooted in open source (iOS is
from OSX is from NextStep is from Mach/BSD, and of course Android is Linux).

EDIT: Lawtonfogle is absolutely right, so I removed the word "completely" and
left "unremarkable". Good point. Also I think most small fish die on their
own. Usually because they build the wrong product.

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ectoplasm
Big fish are almost always eaten by small fish. Small fish are almost always
eaten by big fish. At least there's a nice symmetry to it.

~~~
smt88
_If_ small fish get eaten at all. The vast, vast majority don't. They just
die.

So to rephrase what you're saying: fish that get eaten are eaten by other
fish. Not quite as interesting.

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jasode
This post seems like a restatement of " _The Innovator 's Dilemma_"[1] by
Clayton Christensen.

A new product that serves a market that is initially small _but growing_ is
ignored by the established company. The established company is conditioned to
focus on their _current_ customers' needs instead of imagining that _future_
customers of a product they don't currently make could be a much bigger
market.

A Stanford prof like Mark Leslie would presumably be well-read and therefore
be aware of Clayton Christensen's popular book. He should explicitly state
where his thesis differs from, or is more refined than, The Innovator's
Dilemma.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

~~~
tchock23
That was my first thought as well. This is a blatant rip off of the theory of
disruptive innovations put forth by Clayton Christensen many years ago.

~~~
louprado
Or Gandhi's quote: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they
fight you, then you win."

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vacri
Survivor Bias? Confirmation Bias? Wilful ignorance of the 'acqui-hire'? These
and more, just take your pick.

I also like how smartphone OSes are implied to be 'small fish', when both
major OSes were released by giant thunder-lizard companies, both with far more
'household name' power than IBM.

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voyou
Seems rather unconvincing to frame your article on "small fish" eating "big
fish" with a story about big fish IBM vs the small fish of DEC and Sun. IBM
currently has (according to Google) a market capitalisation of 160 billion
dollars; DEC and Sun don't exist any more.

~~~
wslh
And Apple, and Microsoft, and Oracle...

I think now companies are more conscious about the innovator dilemma and they
can acquire innovators before they grow and integrate or kill them into their
ecosystem.

Although the innovator dilemma is real, company profits came also from support
contracts, so acquiring a cheaper more innovative product will also include a
big support contract.

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nrao123
Great stuff by Leslie. He is also the author of Sales Learning Curve, a
framework to figure out when to ramp up your sales force.

 _Likewise, technology companies shouldn 't expect to sell their 1.0 product
without undergoing a learning curve around the needed feature set, the
competitive response, the right type of channel and sales rep, optimal
pricing, etc. And yet, nearly every business plan I have seen shifts gears
directly from Development to Sales, staffed by a growing number of experienced
sales reps charged to sell their regular quota of product.

The consequence of skipping the Sales Learning Curve in a business plan is all
too common: the company fails to meet the plan, sales reps are fired,
eventually the VP Sales is fired, and the company has to raise a highly
dilutive down round of capital to stay in business.

Leslie's prescription for success and capital efficiency is a plan that
includes the Sales Learning Curve. Accept that until we're out there selling,
we can't know what we don't know about the selling process. The goal at this
point is to maximize runway, since you can't rush science. As my erudite
partner and Harvard Business School Professor Felda Hardymon likes to
instruct, "run the business like a one story whorehouse" (with no fucking
overhead). Hire only two or three creative, guerilla-style reps and a VP who
knows how to experiment with multiple channels.

It may take 4, 7, or 10 quarters to climb the curve. Only then, when your
sales force is a profit center (with two quarters where contribution exceeds
twice the sales costs) is it time to flick the switch. At this point, raise
lots of capital and hire as many talented reps as you can possibly find! This
kind of prescriptive framework for clearly distinguishing the phases of a
company is so much more actionable than the wishy-washy approach of hesitantly
adding more and more sales reps over time._

[http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.in/2005/09/best-startup-
ad...](http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.in/2005/09/best-startup-advice-i-
have.html)

[https://hbr.org/2006/07/the-sales-learning-
curve](https://hbr.org/2006/07/the-sales-learning-curve)

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tzakrajs
The author is leaving out the fact that the big fish are eating the small fish
in acquisitions.

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hardwaresofton
Maybe I'm not thinking about it long or hard enough, but this article just
seems kind of wrong.

Acquisition events are way more common than small-company-eats-big-company
events. It's literally logically impossible for small fish to always eat big
fish, because there would then never be any big fish to start with, all fish
would work out to the same size +/\- one fish.

[EDIT] - After reading some more of the article it's just the title that is
linkbaity/exaggerated... I made too cursory an evaluation

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higherpurpose
Only if the small fish doesn't sell-out before it has a chance to become a
major threat to its competitors (see Whatsapp or Instagram, for instance).

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dctoedt
"Leslie's Law" would have just a bit more credibility if someone other than
Mr. Leslie himself had bestowed the label.

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toolslive
"There's always a bigger fish" (I just had to say this)

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PantaloonFlames
correction: In Technology, Big Fish, if they get eaten, are almost always
eaten by Small Fish. Also, Small Fish almost always don't survive.

