Page 209 - Overthrow_Black&WhiteVersion

How structural changes and investment
are fuelling a new generation of challengers
‘This time is genuinely different’
There was a time when challenger thinking primarily engaged the attention of two kinds of people: naturally entrepreneurial founders, and Chief Marketing Officers with business ambitions that were bigger than their conventional marketing resources. The past decade has seen it become
of considerable interest to a third kind of person: the VC.
For a while it looked as if ‘startup’ had become the new ‘challenger’ in terms of aspirational mindset and culture. As Silicon Valley invested in tech-based innovators intent on overturning the legacy-bound establishment, and a new generation of tech giants grew to change our lives and their founders’ fortunes, every entrepreneur, it seemed, wanted
to be in a new startup, and every ageing company wanted its perceived culture of energy, creativity and possibility.
But the aspirational bloom seems to be coming
off the Silicon Valley rose. Protests over internal cultures at iconic tech companies, controversy over the realities of working conditions and pay in the gig economy, disquiet over the founders’ refusal
to take responsibility for some of the unintended consequences of their new scale and impact – along, perhaps, with the occasional difficulty
208 'This time is genuinely different'