This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Mike Olson: Competition Forces You to Up Your Game" created on November 16, 2013. It features Mike Olson discussing the importance of competition in driving company growth and innovation, highlighting the need for a rich ecosystem of companies to create a large market opportunity.
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So you know, one thing I'll say flat out, and this is honestly true and from the heart. We believed from the beginning, creating the company, that we would be building a company worth billions of dollars, right? Selling into a market worth tens of billions of dollars a year. And there are zero examples of a single company in a space that gets to that scale. The only way that you can make that happen is, is if there's a rich ecosystem of companies building and delivering value in that space. Relational databases would never have become big if it had just been IBM systemr, right? You need lots and lots of companies innovating and driving into the market. So while the competitive pressure create new challenges for us and force us to up our game, if we didn't have those challenges, you would have wasted your Series A investment, right? The entrance of players like EMC and pivotal of IBM into the market, much less the venture backed little guys, that means there's an opportunity. We have more than 700 companies in our partner program building apps on top of delivering integration services for shipping the hardware that our platform runs on. That ecosystem is focused on winning new business and driving adoption by customers. That creates huge opportunity for, for us, right? That allows us to sell into a way bigger market than we could ever have made happen on our own. We just got a lot more hands banging on the drum than we ever could have created on our own. The emergence of real competition has forced us to up our game. And you know, you've been in the boardroom and very supportive as we've done it. But what five year old company is simultaneously in a knife fight with IBM, SAP and Teradata, right? I mean first world problems guys, but problems, right? I mean, you know, we are forced now to operate at a scale and with a professionalism that is unusual in the market. It's driven by the scale of the opportunity. We wouldn't have those competitors if they didn't see the dollars happening. But growing up that fast has forced us to be very, very disciplined and to be careful about bringing in new leadership and new capabilities steadily over the life of the business.
