TL;DR: An upstart’s advantage: pick one attractive niche within an incumbent’s vast network and dominate it. The incumbent must defend everywhere; you only need to win one place.
Incumbents are networks. They serve hundreds of niches, each with acceptable but not outstanding fit. You can’t beat them everywhere. But you can pick the single niche they’re least optimized for—where their generalist solution creates the most friction—and build a solution that’s 10x better for that use case.
This is the core asymmetry of network-based competition. The incumbent pays the cost of serving everyone; you pay it for one. Once you’ve monopolized your niche, you can expand adjacent. But the entry point must be narrow enough that you can genuinely dominate before moving. (atomic-network, cold-start-problem)