Immelt: Incumbents hold massive advantages over startups through existing distribution and use cases
Jeff Immelt · 20VC: Jeff Immelt on Leadership Lessons from 16 Years as CEO @ GE, Incumbent Innovation; Why Some Have Failed and Other Succeeded, When Boards Have A Positive vs Negative Impact on a Company & The One Fear Startup Founders Are Allowed To Have · Jul 22, 2021 · at 9:23
Former GE CEO Jeff Immelt contrasts early-stage startup commercial operations with the distribution scale and domain access of enterprise incumbents.
0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“What legacy companies don't realize is they have the keys to the kingdom and that you own the use case really, which is, you know, like I sit with startups and they're saying, you know, I want to add 10 salespeople. And I say, you know, guys, really back in the day, I had 40,000 salespeople like I could sell. And a 180 countries around the world”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jeff Immelt
Immelt: Investor board input is often selfish and harms the company
“Some of the input you're getting is really selfish by the investors from their perspective, but not good for the company.”
Immelt: No other leadership team on earth could have saved GE in 2008
“We made it to shore, we saved the company, we preserved the businesses, and I would say to people, look, no other team on earth could have done what we did.”
Immelt: GE should have partnered with Salesforce or Microsoft for software
“Here's what I would have done differently, you know, Harry, in all honesty, I've had four years to think about it, is I would have either bought a part of a startup company or done a joint venture with maybe salesforce.com or Microsoft and created a new co, cr…”
Immelt: Musk, Bezos, and Benioff are not good listeners
“I guarantee you that if Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Benioff ever did a review, a three 60, the people around them aren't saying they're really good listeners. There's a lot of people say, They didn't listen to it, but they are listening, right? They are li…”