Last month I attended the inaugural Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas, a 3-day blitz featuring 250 speakers and 3,000 executives from tech and retail.
It was a Valley / No-Valley mash-up with representation from Google to Neiman Marcus, Amazon to burgeoning startups, and finally, curious investors.
Among the ~dozen panels and keynotes I attended, the common theme was a shared fear of Amazon.
Of course, one can’t even think about e-commerce without the obligatory Bezos Nod. But it bums me out that a zero-asset dollar store, pricing intelligence API, and countless other companies are kept up at night by the creators of the Fire Phone.
So while every retail startup is concerned about Amazon entering their space, or frightened to death of entering Amazon’s space, I offer another viewpoint:
The Amazon Killer will be Amazon
This is almost classic Christensen thinking.
Without plagiarizing a wise man, huge businesses fail because they a) get trapped in serving their biggest customers and b) can’t afford to serve up-and-coming markets.
But in startups, this is exactly what we do. We approach underserved, over-served, inefficient, and even efficient markets offering what we believe are better solutions to existing problems. Heck, we create solutions for problems that don’t even exist yet. Startups are awesome!
And this brings us to the bottom line:
Of course Amazon could enter your space.
Of course they have better engineers and more marketing budget.
But time has demonstrated over and again that when companies reach a peculiar size, they don’t explode, they implode.