Dominic Orr, CEO of Aruba Networks, describes how a start-up can compete with large, established companies.
Don't compare your company with big companies. Every product that you build it has to really fit in to your company. Everything boils down in to one thing, and that is SPEED.
Once an opportunity has been identified, a start-up's single advantage is speed: because established firms have different incentives that lead to inertia, large firms are often unable to match the speed and flexibility of a start-up.
Transcription: Now one of the interesting things about Aruba is that you have decided to come head to head with very big giants in the industry such as Cisco. So how does a small company have the confidence and strategy to go against a giant like that? So we do today from the product level point of view have two competitors, Cisco and Motorola. And we kind of find the space in between. When you’re operating in that environment you cannot think of those giants as competitors. You have to think of them as an environment in which you excel. In every product you build you have to plan to fit into the whole ecosystem. You have to look for what is really breaking that they cannot fix. I’ve done enough start ups now if you ask me the formula of success, it all boils down to one factor. And that is speed. Speed of execution and speed of innovation. And that is not to say that the large companies is not speedy but the benefit of the big company they have the inertia but the drawback is the inertia. When I entered the industry there was a popular saying that God was able to build the earth in 7 days because He did not have any install base. The big company has this legacy of stuff they have to sell and they have a certain expectation and something to project and so on they have to stay on the course. You can map out their course in 4-5 quarters and the way you react is I’m going to get their faster with a vision that they cannot afford to execute because by executing that vision they will affect their business. So yes we have probably in that process the small company has a higher density of motivated people and the drive to make things happen but let’s not fool ourselves Cisco and Motorola has a lot of talented members with great engineering knowledge. So you can’t outsmart the big guy you can just out speed him.
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