The sands in Silicon Valley are shifting all the time. Building computing infrastructure from scratch used to be par for the course for startups; now, many opt for cloud. Major cloud hyperscalers are eating a ton of customers, but there remains hope for the market’s smaller fish. Crafty entrepreneurs today can make it with cloud-based vertical services, according to Rehan Jalil (pictured), former president and chief executive officer of Elastica Inc., a cloud security startup that was acquired by Symantec Corp. in 2016.

“All the value creation is kind of moving up the chain,” Jalil said.

Jalil spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, as part of the Mayfield People First event that recently took place in Menlo Park, California. They discussed the changing landscape for entrepreneurs, and pro tips for startup success. (* Disclosure below.)

Seeing around the innovation curve

Cloud-native startups might bemoan the dominance of cloud providers like Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud Platform. Indeed, if they attempt to poach markets already cornered, they may fall on their faces. But if they focus on specialized vertical services built on top of cloud infrastructure, they could befriend those behemoths, according to Jalil.

“If you leverage that, then the cost of building startups and the cost of doing new things is going to come down,” he stated.

That is not to say it’s all cake being an entrepreneur today. The lowered barrier to entry through low-cost cloud opens the arena to more competitors. “Even if you come up with something really compelling, by the time it’s going to be getting deployed, somebody will catch up to you,” Jalil stated.

This is why startups have to think and innovate ahead of the curve.

Jalil learned this in a previous role at WiChorus Inc. The company’s 4G networking mobile-phone technology arrived early enough to catch the iPhone worm.

“If you were to go talk to investors [at that time] and say, ‘Look … we will have internet in our pocket,’ people would smile at you like, what are you talking about?” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mayfield People First event. (Disclosure: TheCUBE’s coverage of the Mayfield People First event is presented by Mayfield Fund LLC.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE