When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built Apple in a garage, the incumbents they were up against were slow-moving hardware companies. When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, Barnes & Noble wasn’t pouring billions into machine learning or cloud infrastructure. This doesn’t mean that it was easy for these entrepreneurs to change the face of whole industries. It was not. But it was at least possible. Back then, giants could be out-innovated because they were bureaucratic, cautious, and often blind to the potential of what the upstart start-ups were building.

The situation is very different today. The startup landscape has changed radically. Where once it was populated by bootstrapping innovators who hoped to build giants from tiny seeds, today many of the most promising opportunities are gobbled up by

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