Steve Case Grosses $96 Million on Zipcar
This article was first published on 9 January 2013.
I want to highlight three points that emerge from this story:
- CEOs, executive teams and strategists need to understand that there is a large community of people out there, many of them very well funded, working on businesses with the specific intention of disrupting the established players in the industry.
- While the disruption in this instance wasn’t based on technology, it was most definitely the result of challenging the conventions, orthodoxies and practices that underpinned the existing business model for rental cars – particularly the convention that the unit of rental should be 24 hours
- The final point is that in this case the challenger was acquired by a leading industry incumbent. I don’t have a view on whether that’s a good or bad thing. I would suggest though that incumbents who assume they can always buy out disruptive challengers if they start to get too much traction are playing a dangerous game.