With the announcement last week that Borders, the second biggest bookstore chain, has filed for bankruptcy, this is yet another company couldn’t quite seem to cross the chasm, to borrow a phrase from Geoffrey Moore.  Following a long line of companies such as Blockbuster, Toys R Us and others, this seems to be one more case of companies within industries that are being transformed by new or existing players who incorporate digital tools into their business model and disrupt others in the process.

Companies such as Amazon (in the case of book selling), Netflix, Apple (with iTunes) and others are prescient enough to understand that, aside from selling digital tools, there are big returns available for companies, which employ these tools and create a disruptive business model in an established industry.  The opportunity is so big that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and others established a US $250 million fund to invest in startups that do just that.  As Zuckerberg said, “we think every industry needs to be rethought.”

Today, startups such as Airbnb, Square and others have been founded by people with strong technical skills (in addition to business people).  Nevertheless, as we’ve seen here at Koombea, the opportunity is so interesting that business people with unique insight about an industry or an opportunity are able to develop a disruptive action plan and execute it.  Their lack of a technical co-founder need not be an impediment.

Indeed, we ascribe much of our recent growth as a company to the fact that the current opportunity to redefine industry competitive dynamics is so large that even founders with little technical knowledge can be well-served by a team member such as Koombea, which has even served as a virtual CTO and virtual Business Development partner at times. The result are founding teams which can quickly start validating their idea and gain traction while waiting to hire a full time CTO or technical team.

Certainly, there are advantages to having a technical person on the founding team. Nevertheless, we’ve seen cases where it may make more sense for the founding team to work with a company such as Koombea and hit the ground running fast through their existing process and infrastructure.