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“Welcome.”
That was Steve Jobs’ famous response when IBM entered the PC market in 1981. Maybe Jobs should have been more worried.
After all, by 1984 IBM sold $4B worth of PCs versus Apple’s $2B.
The question of “What if Facebook/Google/IBM/Texas Instruments/Intel/(name your tech behemoth here) enters our market?” has been around forever. And it’s a favorite question for investors to ask when you’re raising money.
Now, it’s not as if investors don’t know the answer. They do know the answer. What investors want to see is your reaction the question.
Investors already know that almost nothing (except bulletproof patent protection, and that’s rare) stops any company in any industry from implementing the same new feature/product/service that you just implemented. They also know that small companies (startups) have many advantages versus their larger competitors.
I used to get asked a variation of this question (in my case it was, “What if Texas Instruments or Maxim or Analog Devices or Linear Technology come after you?”) when I was raising money. The answer was always the same.
“Nothing is going to stop them. It will take their best people to do what we are doing.
