Then, reports emerged that Amazon had already launched a meal kit, which was on sale in Seattle.
In the case of Snap, it was Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg and company had been fighting to blunt Snap’s growth ever since its co-founder, Evan Spiegel, rejected his buyout offer in 2013. It began to see progress with the launch of Instagram Stories in August 2016, which duplicated Snapchat’s own Stories feature. Over the next year, it gradually copied nearly every major Snapchat feature in its own products.
Less than a year after launch, Instagram Stories has 250 million daily users, and is growing at a rate of around 50 million every three months. Snap has 173 million and grew only 7 million during the quarter.
The experiences of these companies are discouraging for start-up investors and founders who dream of someday creating an Amazon or Facebook of their own.
The five big tech companies — Alphabet (Google), Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft — have attained unprecedented wealth and power, with trillions of dollars in combined market value and tens of billions of dollars in free cash flow.
They also need to satisfy Wall Street’s appetite for growth, which means they have to get new customers or earn more money from existing customers, quarter after quarter, year after year. One way to do that is to expand into new markets.
