Page 220 - Overthrow_Black&WhiteVersion

both culture and investment decisions, and Cosmetic Purpose, where neither of those things
is true, and it is purely a marketing tagline, in effect. What both Verlinvest and The Craftory are finding powerful here in their chosen challengers is an Integral Purpose, not necessarily born at the same time as the company (Oatly was over 25 years old when the leadership team reinvented it), but one whose clarity and energy drives everything they do.
How are we going to take advantage of it?
What makes these two interviews so interesting, of course, is that they represent the commercial mindset of the experienced investor. This is not the romantic optimism of the young entrepreneur, but seasoned financiers putting their money behind their conviction that this is a new wave
of challengers surging on the back of a favourably changing business context.
This doesn’t mean that this is true for challengers across all categories – Ernesto Schmitt noted the difficulty for a tech challenger today up against
the established behemoths: it would take a brave investor to bet today on a new challenger in search, for instance. And, in an entirely different tech category, Elon Musk is famously finding that profitable mass production for an automotive challenger is considerably harder than successful concept development.
219