A short transcript excerpt from a January 2025 YouTube conversation (Jason M. Lemkin and another speaker) about how incumbents respond to platform shifts. Speakers argue that many incumbents have learned from Clayton Christensen, are moving quickly (e.g., Microsoft, HubSpot, Salesforce), and can marshal large engineering and sales resources—making them powerful competitors against startups.
The other thing I think is a.
Little bit different about this than other platform shifts is it feels like everyone has read and learned the lessons of Clay Christensen and the Innovator's Dilemma. And the incumbents seem to be moving very quickly, whether it's Microsoft or HubSpot or Salesforce, you name it. No one seems to be sitting on their hands in this one. So I like as I play on both sides of this, but in this particular case, I think the incumbents have a little bit more of an advantage than in most platform shifts.
Yeah, I advise founders. I think they get bigger, big company. Maybe HubSpot's bigger or not big, depending on how you think about it.
I think they.
Misunderstand agility. When there is a core priority, and it's truly core, they move fast. Not quite as fast as a startup, but when they put 200 engineers on something, 300 engineers, it's a force of nature. What you get wrong is when they put 10. When they put 10, it's weird because they launch a really cool product. There were even in my little team at Adobe, we had 10 extra engineers. Extra. You never have extra engineers at a startup. So you could build anything, but you can't sell it and support it, you give up. Right? But when HubSpot says Dharmesh really early saying we're going all in, be careful, and Mark Benioff putting a thousand new sales folks like just, you can still beat them. Don't get me wrong, everyone beats somebody before them. But it's a force of nature. Isn't. Is.
