👉 Background: Employment Hero is the Australian HR tech company that helps small businesses with payroll, onboarding and hiring. It hit unicorn status in 2022 when it raised capital at a $1.25B valuation. Meanwhile, Seek is the OG Australian digital jobs marketplace that’s been around since 1997. The two companies know each other well. In fact, Seek's venture capital fund invested in Employment Hero’s unicorn-reaching-capital-raise.

👉 What happened: Recently, Employment Hero launched its own zero-fee hiring platform called SmartMatch -- a direct competitor to Seek’s paid job listings. Now, Seek has cut Employment Hero’s access to the Seek API (ie the tech bridge that helped Employment Hero users tap into Seek’s job listings). And now, Employment Hero is going one step further by dragging Seek to court for cutting the access to its API.  

👉 What else: Employment Hero claims that blocking access to Seek’s API was anti-competitive. And, it seems like Seek is getting a taste of its own disruptor-medicine.

What's the key learning?

💡Once a disruptor, always a disruptor… until you become the disrupted. Seek helped kill job ads in newspaper classifieds, but now it's trying to avoid its own Kodak moment. And by blocking Employment Hero from its API, it’s sending a message: we aren’t playing friendly with a potential competitor anymore.

💡In fact, Seek recently sold down a $95 million stake in Employment Hero. But Seek isn’t the only disruptor to become the disrupted. eBay grew to become a $76 billion USD behemoth when it disrupted the old garage sale as well as The Trading Post. But, over the past 5 years, it has lost ground to Facebook Marketplace (which is free), as well as niche resale apps like Depop and Poshmark that attract Gen Z. Now, eBay's market cap is less than half of its all-time high.

💡And what about TripAdvisor? At its prime, it disrupted travel agents and guidebooks. But now, it’s losing relevance as people lean into TikTok recommendations and Google reviews. So, each of these companies rewrote the rulebook in their prime… but now, 20+ years on, they’re facing their own disruptors.