Instruction
You and your top-notch start-up team have developed an exciting new technology, and you have chosen to commercialize it in a way so that it squarely undermines and will compete with an established player. When you meet with potential employees, investors, and customers, everyone immediately talks about the potential for “disrupting” the traditional industry.
You walk into a meeting at Battery Ventures, and are immediately met with skepticism. The General Partner you are meeting with is blunt: “While the business press is filled with compelling stories of disruptive technologies and companies that have undermined traditional players, there are a much smaller number of examples of companies that have been able to not simply disrupt the competition but also establish their own (durable) competitive advantage.”
While you and your team do your best to salvage the meeting, the comment worries you.
Surfing the Web one late night, you come across what seems to be a curious relic from an earlier age: Reed Hastings discussing Netflix at the start-up stage (http://archive.org/details/HotNewWe01_5?start=760 , Netflix starts at 12:42mark).
You get an inspiration and email quickly around to your team: let’s try and understand how a company like Netflix was able to not simply disrupt the video rental business but also establish itself as a long-term leader in both the DVD rental business as well as at least the first generation of streaming video.
Your team agrees to see if the history and choices of Netflix offers some more general strategic and operational lessons for start-ups who are seeking to pursue a disruptive strategy.
Looking over the video and the Netflix case, your assignment is to evaluate how Netflix made a disruptive strategy “work.”
While you should feel free to structure your analysis to most clearly illustrate what you think Netflix “got right” (and wrong) and what lessons there might be for future disruptive start-ups, it might be helpful to focus on the following:
What were the core elements of Netflix’s strategy during their years as a startup(say through 2006)? What was distinctive about their approach and strategy, and what choices did they make that allowed them to achieve their success? What were some of the risks of their approach?
How did Netflix develop this strategy? What key lessons did they learn in their early years that allowed them to succeed later on?
If you were to take away one lesson from Netflix that you think generalizes toa company commercializing a disruptive technology or service, what would it be? Why do you think this insight translates across different settings?