← back to home
created: Feb 2024
While I was at Adobe working on Firefly, many Gen AI founders used to approach me to ask about Adobe's roadmap. They wanted to know if Adobe planned to ship products like theirs and wondered if they should preemptively pivot. I could see the worry in their eyes and it was understandable.
I never shared our roadmap. But telling them "yes, we're launching that soon" might have actually done them more harm. Why? Because what's on an incumbent's roadmap rarely matters. Big companies simply can't outship a startup in the short term. Their first releases are guaranteed to be underwhelming.
I can spend a whole day listing all the inefficiencies of the big company but it boils down to organizational physics. A speedboat will always turn faster than a cruise ship. And startups can easily outexecute an incumbent. There's plenty of evidence: OpenAI and Anthropic beating Gemini; Midjourney vs Adobe; Cursor vs GitHub Copilot, and countless other examples.
I'm bullish on startups—otherwise I wouldn't be a founder myself—but it's important to face reality. And the reality is that, long-term, incumbents are very dangerous. They have real advantages: distribution to millions of existing customers, cross-product integration opportunities, trust with enterprise clients, established brand recognition, and virtually unlimited capital. Microsoft Teams vs. Slack is a prime example. Teams leveraged Microsoft's enterprise relationships and Office integration to reach 270 million users, ultimately crushing Slack despite its early lead.
Yet there are exceptions worth studying. Canva has successfully defended against Adobe despite their heavy investment in Express and all hands effort. Canva initially targeted a market underserved by Adobe - non-pro creators - and expanded from there, establishing network effects and a strong brand along the way. By the time Adobe shipped Express, their response to Canva, it was already too late. It was an epic battle to witness.
So it is possible to create durable advantages before incumbents catch up. The critical period appears to be the first 24-36 months, during which big companies are still reorganizing and conducting countless alignment meetings in search of consensus. This time period is crucial for startups to build defensibility and user lock-in.
The message is clear: pick the right incumbents to compete against and grow as quickly as possible before they catch up. They will catch up eventually, so develop a strategy for that. But don't overthink this now—focus on winning the battle directly in front of you. The window of opportunity isn't permanent, but it's very real.