Why corporates eat hustlers for breakfast

We all love YouTube and LinkedIn. Both companies have one thing in common: they were once served as big corporations’ breakfast.

YouTube was eaten by Google, while LinkedIn was eaten by Microsoft. Eating is a hustler’s term for being bought.

Such breakfasts are quite common – they are used to stop hustlers from threatening big corporations’ core businesses. Unencumbered by bureaucracy and legacy, firms started by hustlers can threaten the biggest firms through creative destruction, to quote Joseph Schumpeter.

Hustlers’ firms are able to identify gaps in the market and quickly exploit them without having to do feasibility studies like big corporations whose leaders have to answer to shareholders and company boards of directors.

Dell, Apple and other laptop manufacturers gnawed on a computer market dominated by IBM by refining the laptop and making it available to the masses. Microsoft helped hustlers use computers more easily using the mouse instead of the old system where the user had to remember commands. Eventually, IBM sold its laptop division to the Chinese multinational Lenovo.

In medical and pharmaceutical fields, big corporations love eating the small firms started by hustlers, particularly if they own patents.

In Kenya, some hustlers’ firms, particularly SMEs, have also been breakfast for private equity funds mostly based in the West. Remember Helios fund and Equity Bank? Java was bought, sorry, eaten, by a private equity fund. Interconsumer had one of its brands bought out by French cosmetics giant L’Oreal. Luckily, the hustling owners of these firms make a big kill when they are eaten.

Will the eating stop? As long as hustlers’ firms show potential for growth and innovation, they will keep attracting big, hungry corporations with deep pockets.

Why not start a side hustle and dangle it to big corporations? After all, being eaten is not all that bad financially