157 How Category Contenders Become Category Leaders with Al Ramadan, Co-Author of Play Bigger

Thanks for pressing play. There comes a time in every startup's life where they face an epic, typically 18 to 36 month category battle. And as we reported in our first book, Plate Bigger, the company that wins that battle earns 76% of the total value created in the category as measured by the market caps for public companies and valuations for private companies. So what that means is in space after space after space, one company earns two thirds of the economics, which makes that category battle, which is typically 18 to 36 months long, arguably the highest stakes game in business. Today we're going to unpack that game. On this episode you're going to learn one, what is actually at stake in these category battles. Two, two, how you can spot the category challengers, the companies with the biggest chance of becoming the category queens and kings that win. And three, what these challengers need to do to become the category leader and earn 76% of the economics. Now, if you are a category pirate subscriber, and if you're not, I highly recommend you become one. You've been reading of late some of our work on category science, which is which is really about the power of data in the context of category design. You've been learning about the power of weird data, of looking for the different. And if you've read or watched the movie or book Moneyball, that's also a powerful, cool example of how data can bring a breakthrough in understanding which leads to changing and ultimately winning the game that you create. So today we asked the powerful question, what can category science teach us about how to win the category design game? Welcome to a very special episode and we're going to drop this episode in both Lockhead on Marketing and Follow youw Different because it's that important. Our guest today is my brother from another mother, the legendary Al Ramadan. And I've known al for over 20 years. He's one of the most extraordinary people I've ever met. He's one of the biggest contributors to my life and we've had pretty much almost every kind of type of rep of relationship two guys can have. And Al is probably most well known now for being the co author of Play Bigger and being a founder and now CEO of Play Bigger Advisors. All of that makes Al one of the godfathers and OGs of category design. Now recently Al and his team at Play Bigger did a major new category science research report. And I think what you're about to hear, the insights you're about to glean, the data you're about to come in contact with, you're going to find very illuminating this data and these insights will help you build your career, your company, and maybe even your investment strategy. In this latest work, what Al did was go back to Play Bigger. And in Play bigger, we identified 35 category kings. And that research was done approximately seven years ago. And so they wanted to look at what's happened to those category kings over the last seven years. The results are shocking and illuminate the power of of becoming the category leader like nothing else. Further, they've done some new research. Al and the Play Bigger team have identified 200 emerging category challengers in the tech industry in the United States. 200 companies they believe have the potential to become the queens and kings of the next era. In this discussion, we unpack what challengers must do to to become the next cohort of category leaders. So if you care about data, if you care about understanding the game, creating the game, and playing the game that you design so that you can win, you're in the right place. Now, readers like you have made category pirates latest book, Snow Leopard how legendary writers create a category of one, a number one Amazon bestseller in marketing, writing and publishing. So I want to thank you very much for that. It's an extraordinary thing. And if you haven't read the book yet, Snow Leopard is taking on the content world by storm. And not only is it critical for writers and anybody in the creator and content world, it's also critical for category designers. Because when you understand what makes legendary content go, you understand what makes legendary categories go. So go to Amazon.com and pick up your copy of Snow Leopard today. Now, as Joey Ramon said, hey ho. Let's go.

This is Locketta Marketing, the podcast that helps you develop the lens for what makes legendary marketing legendary. Hosted by Christopher Lockhead, three time CMO Godfather category design, and a high school dropout who the marketing journal calls one of the best minds in marketing and the economist are fitting to some.

Alan. Alan. Alan.

Christopher. Christopher.

It's great to see you, brother.

You too, bud.

I always love it when you come over. So you come bearing data and a fascinating conversation about from contenders to fucking. The champs, the queens, the kings, the kings, the kings who take it all. So we did some pretty amazing research, what, six or so years ago for Play Bigger.

Yeah, 2014, just before we wrote the book, you remember this? We were sitting in the same room looking at different pages of information about how category kings took 76% of the market cap. Remember that?

Yes. And so what we got was we wanted to understand not Market share. There's been a lot of research done on that. But what company or what happens as it relates to value created in the category as measured by market cap, the for public companies and valuation for private companies. So you take all the companies in a category, add their valuations and market caps together and say that's the total value created in a given space. What percentage goes to the category leader? And we wrote the article for Harvard Business Review. Obviously it's in the book that number, 76%. It surprised us. And I think subsequently it has surprised a lot of others.

It has, it has become kind of the industry benchmark, that 3/4 goes to one company. But it's also not a surprise. I mean, you start looking around you, you look at Amazon, you look at Apple, you look at Facebook, you start looking at the category kings, as we call them back then, and it's no surprise that they're the only show in town. Right?

Yeah. And it's, you know, back when we originally wrote Play Bigger, the world was nowhere near as digitized as it is today. So back then we said, well, this is tech categories. Of course, that's where our research was based. But more and more categories are behaving like tech categories because they have the digital SC and a lot of the reach and all the things that technology companies tend to have. But still, people were skeptical. Oh, we're in the blah, blah, blah industry and that doesn't matter. Well, of course, what we're seeing is as every industry and category ultimately becomes a technology one, these characteristics are becoming truer and truer for everybody.

It's so true. And you just. At the time when we were doing our work, we'd identified Tesla as one of these, what we now call contenders. And at the time, they were a.

Contender at the time.

At the time. Correct. Way back then. This is 2014. Right. And they're now valued at more than a trillion dollars. And the second biggest player is in fact one of the traditional automotive industry companies like a ford or a GM. And they're less than 100 million. Right. So their 10x in that period of time went to Tesla.

Yes. It's not because they have a better product.

Right. And what's cool about this was. And so it was that insight and that inspiration and that journey that we went on back then that we started again just recently. And we started to look at, well, let's not reinvent anything. Let's go back and have a look at the 35 companies, Christopher, that you and I and others kind of debated at the time and arm wrestled over and we eventually named 35 kings back in that report. You remember this?

Yes, of course, it's been a few whiskeys ago, but I have a general recognition of it.

Well, if you track what happened to those 35 kings, as we called them back then, between the year of 2014 to the year of 2021. You want to know what the numbers are?

Yes, I do.

Okay. So at the time in 2014, the entire pool, or the 35 category kings were valued at 465 billion, Christopher. 465 billion in 2014. They are now valued at 1.9 billion trillion. That is, they've created more than $1.5 trillion in market cap. And the annual, for those people who care about this stuff, like investors and financial people, the compound interest growth rate of those kings, market cap wise. Yes. Is 22.46%. The Nasdaq's much less than that. Right, right. And so this class of.

So let's just get the numbers so in play bigger. And in HBR, we originally published a set and tracked 35 category kings in the tech space at the time. And their market caps at the time were 465 billion. And those same companies today, six and a half or whatever it is seven years later. Seven years later. Yeah, because we did the research before the book, obviously is 1.92 trillion. Yeah. And the interesting thing is how many venture capitalists understand that this is now the dynamic and how many entrepreneurs and marketers still think, oh, this is going to be a big space, it's going to be lots of room. Yeah, yeah, we still hear that.

I know. I think we hear it less. I think people have come to accept with the speed at which this stuff's happening now, like we found in the time to market research that this is all happening actually a little quicker than it used to. And companies like a Tesla or companies like a Facebook or companies like a, an Apple or an Amazon or whatever those companies. You now seeing that the number two and the number three player is like one whole factor of 10 or 100 times smaller. Right. And we're going to be publishing stuff on electric vehicle category in a little bit. You and I have already done some really cool stuff about Rivian. Rivian. This is all at the end of 2014, of 2021. Rivian was in the sort of 40, $50 billion market cap. You know, Tesla was at the time a trillion. Ford was at 60 and so on. And so it was mind boggling to us when we were looking at this, that you know that there was a new generation of companies coming up. We call them contenders now. That's what this whole report's about. Right. So Rivian is a contender in a category of electronic vehicle, which they call adventure vehicles, not SUVs. Adventure vehicles. Right. And they're valued at 50 billion today. If they become a king, that might be 500 billion. If you follow the arc of what happened with those 35 kings, it becomes really interesting.

So the first insight with the new research is something we understood at the time, but now it's extraordinary the compounding power that a category can amasses.

Yeah, that's the, that's the first take home is, is that at the time we were. And when we wrote the book, we, we created the term category king because we wanted to explain who these folks were or who these incredible companies were. Right. And so we just didn't have the benefit of time, which we now have. So seven years later, we now know that they increased the, their market cap by 1.5 trillion. And then we got interested and we said, well, okay, so if we were smart and we were rough, as we always used to say, we would want to know who's the next king. Like, wouldn't you want to know that?

So the aha here is for play bigger the book. We did this research, we've discovered these companies. And this is the data on how they've progressed since then.

Correct.

Now, the interesting piece in this new data set, in addition to that is who are the tech companies today in Silicon Valley that have potential to be the next batch of those companies?

That's the question.

And those we're calling contenders, they're the category contenders.

And what we did to do this was we said, okay, before we go looking for anybody new, why don't we just start with our same 35 companies? Let's wind the clock back. So let's go back instead of 2014, though most of these companies were reasonably well established at that point in time. Some of them weren't, but most of them were. Let's wind the clock back to when.

They were 5 years old on the same 35.

Same 35.

Because now what we're doing is we're getting an expand, we're expanding the lens to say what's happening over time with the value of these companies.

Yes.

And what can we learn from it?

Yeah, well, and there was, we were getting hinted at too, a little bit by our own research. We did this work with the 610 lawyer. Remember that? Where the vast Majority of market cap creation of companies that went public, went public at an age between 6 and 10 years. Remember that? And the Harvard Business Review wrote about this and all that sort of stuff. And so there was, we already kind of knew somewhere in here there's something magical going on. So we round wound the clock back to when these companies were five years.

Old before the epic category battle really gets cooking.

Correct. This is for the 35 that we already knew were king. So this is revisionist history, but it's really helpful to kind of look at that. And when you look at that, something really magical actually happens.

Right. And what we know is at that point in general, around the four or five year mark, begins the epic two to three year plus or minus battle for who's gonna have all the marbles.

Yeah, yeah, that's when it happens. And so if you again, sort of going back to the math, at 5 years old, that same 35 companies, they were valued at 88 billion. So this is a lot further back in time than 2014.

When they're five, they're in 80.

Each one of those companies is five years old. The total of all of those companies was a total of 88 billion. By the time they get to 2014, average of about, you know, three to three to three and a half years later, they were at 465 billion. So they went from 88 billion, Chris, to 465 billion. That's an increase of 528% over that period of time, which is a compound interest gross rate for those people, like investors Who Care, of 53% per year.

So let's just take a pause there for a second. So we go From We're a five year old company, there's a group of 35, they're worth 88 billion.

Two years later, about three and a half years later.

Exactly what I said.

You can tell he's really good with numbers people.

That's why we're just trying to get them all right here. So three and some years late, 3.7. 3.7 years later, they're worth 465 billion.

Yes.

And the other interesting thing about that is that's again, in general, there's outliers, blah, blah, blah. That's when they begin to go public is in that six to ten year window, they do. So. So one of the things it's teaching us is teaching us a lot. And then the next data point is we obviously really want to get to. But one of the things that this is showing us is the amount of Value growth that takes place in the private rounds into the public rounds is going to be exponential if you're going to be a category leader.

Yes. Yeah. If you can convert a company from a category contender to a category king, you can see something like a 53% annual compound growth rate for those companies.

Market cap growth rate, not revenue growth.

Yes, but share, share price is based off market market cap and so is rounds of finance. Right. So I mean, it's the way we measure companies.

No, no, I understand, I understand. But a lot of people, they focus on growth, on revenue and of course revenue. Revenue fucking matters. And what we're doing is as, as entrepreneurs, as category designers, as executives, we're trying to build long term enduring market cap value.

Correct, correct.

And revenue is a critical contributor to that.

Yes, yes, it is.

But what this is saying is if you real growth that is supportive of a massive exponential stair, step up into the, ultimately the public markets, you're probably not a category king.

Yeah, you've gone from contender to probably follower.

Right.

Is what's happened. And that's. And, and, and so then the, and then as we, and so the question for us was, okay, we answered our own question, which was if we look back in time, the category kings, during that really formative 3.7 years as a, as they move from contender to king, they created a vast amount high growth rates, all that sort of stuff. And then they went on, Christopher, over a long period of time to, to do better than most market indexes in and of themselves.

Right. So the final number, the most recent number of that basket of 35 is how, how many trillion?

Now it goes from 88 billion to 465 in that sort of, that early period. And it goes from 465 to 1.9 trillion in the seven years after that.

Okay, so we're five years old, the 35 companies are worth 88. We're seven and a half or something like that, years old. The 35 companies are worth 465. And then three years on from that.

Well, yeah, more than that. More. Seven years on from that, they're 1.92.

Okay, got it.

Yeah. And so the question we started asking ourselves is, okay, that's really helpful because we know that this is zone. We've sort of narrowed it down to about 3.7 years. Somewhere in the 5 to 8 range, somewhere in there, there's this zone, which is really, really, really important to go from contender to king. And so what we thought was just like we did in the first book, we said hey, let's go follow some, let's go look for some. Like how would we, let's go find them and start tracking them because that's a really, really, really important part of life and business and growth and all that sort of stuff. So we did, so we did a whole bunch more research. Would you like to know the results?

I'm waiting with bad breath, baited breath.

Well, so we, we work with our friends at PitchBook and Christopher, I can tell you this. The data that we have Today from them, PitchBook relative to the data that we had back in 2014 is like chalk and cheese. I mean they're so different, right?

Well, there was no one source of truth back then. Right. So we had to go do all this sort of patchwork shit.

Right.

To try to piece together because you know, the public markets are easy, the market caps, that's easy. But was, was always really hard was understanding the private rounds and who's increasing in market in valuation and da, da, da.

And pretty much every single one of these contenders is a private company, you.

Know, but now that data is much more readily available and I guess the folks at PitchBook are doing a good job of kind of making sure it's the best.

It's the best for sure and most complete. And so we, we went through and looked at probably four or five thousand companies. We selected 200, 200 category contenders and we.

All in the tech space.

All in the tech space.

Silicon Valley, United States, mostly United States.

I think there's, there might be one company outside the United States, but fundamentally United States, which is where the most of the data is from.

And just just to help my whiskey stained brain, what were the criteria for deciding these 200 or the 200 we're going to declare as category contenders?

Yeah. So they had to, they had to have a few things and we sort of talk about this in, in our, in our report, but we're looking for signatures of a category contender. And so there's a signature related to just fundamental growth in valuation. Investors see something in the future and they're going to sort of give them a premium as a result of that. Right. You see things like revenue growth happening or customer acquisition happening. You see them becoming thought leaders for a problem they become talking about something that's bigger than themselves. Right. And of course they've got a really good product. They've got, you know, a sales and marketing engine that's starting to sort of ramp up and they've got a whole bunch of really good investors in there who know how to make these companies scale, that's kind of the signature.

And they're plus or minus five years or how old are they?

They're anywhere from in this particular study. They're anywhere. The bulk of them are between 5 and 11 years old. I think that's the bulk of them in that sort of stage. Some, some.

They're not early stage anymore.

No, they're definitely much more mature. They're a mature company. They're more like a series in the old sort of language. It would be a series D kind of company.

Right.

Centered somewhere. It might be early, late series C, it might be early series a. It's probably 1824, you know, months away from an IPO. It's kind of. You would, if you said, okay, who are the investors in these companies? You would probably say something like, well, you know, sort of a traditional VC and a late stage VC would be somewhere in that mix.

Right.

They would be the companies that are looking and paying these prices, premiums or giving these valuations to those companies.

And just as a side note, and I know some of this data is plutonium, but the vast majority of these 200 are backed by what most people would recognize as a top tier Silicon Valley technology venture capital.

They are, they are.

There are very few that are self funded and there's very few that are funded by, you know, Fred, Wilma and Betty and Barney's no name fucking vc. Right. These are, these are name. The investors are at least firm names, if not indeed individuals that most people in the tech ecosystem understand are the amongst the top.

Yes.

So there's, there is a correlation between who invests and what happens.

Yeah, that's why we say one of the criteria is powerful investors who know how to make a scale. Because what, what you realize when, and sort of we, we'll talk about some of the companies that we've worked with separate and apart from the data. But when you, when you see someone like a Qualtrics go through that contender into king sort of stage, you truly realize what kind of expertise you need around to actually make it. It's not just about, you know, sort of the idea that you can promote a really big powerful problem, but it's also you got to be able to sell the shit, you got to be able to service the shit, you got to be able to build the shit. Like there's a lot. Right. It's the old magic triangle. Right.

Well, and the other interesting thing. Absolutely. So the top tier VCs, they bring tremendous knowledge and tribal knowledge of how to Build category kings. Yeah. The other one that's interesting, of course is it's a huge market signal. It's another thing that begins to create a self fulfilling prophecy. Right? And so there's been a lot of talk lately about, oh, you know, there's been a lot of these term sheet factories in Silicon Valley have raised billions of dollars and they're just fucking handing out money like it's nothing. Now that's slowed down recently, of course, because of the macro issues. But the interesting thing is who you raise money from matters, because A, do they bring the experience to help you build a category key or not is a very pertinent fucking question. And B, it's a strong market signal. The media, potential employees, other potential investors down the line, and competitors all go, oh shit, you just raised money from who?

Right? Yeah, right. And I would go as far as to say that at least the ones that we work with, and we've been working with the same ones for a long time, these VCs truly understand that it's getting from the contender phase into the king phase. That's where the, that's where the real value gets created. There's a lot that has to happen before that, I. E. You gotta get a team together, you gotta build a product, you gotta like all that stuff, right? And the, you know, it starts with Angels and goes through seed rounds and then sort of more traditional. That's really important. That's not what we're looking at here. We are looking at that cohort who are sort of more along the ways. They've got, you know, sort of product market fit. They've actually identified sort of verticals or, you know, sort of areas, use cases for the problem. And now starting to expand, it's, it's more mature than that.

So you and the team at Play Bigger went out, identified these 200 companies currently in Silicon Valley, all private in the United states, in the U.S. all private, yes. All potentially within 24ish months of going public. All potentially exhibiting potential to go from contender to leader, contender to champion, contender to king and queen. So we've got this basket of 200.

Yeah. And now the good news is we can just like we watch the Kings, we can watch these guys. And so for the next decade, we're going to spend our time watching what happens to these 200 companies and how many of them actually make it to King.

And are you publishing the names on the.

We are.

Of the 200?

We are, we are.

So you're, you're going to say to Silicon Valley and anyone else who's interested here, 200 companies we've identified that have the potential to become category leaders. They're duke in it out. Now, of course, many of them are in the same category, fighting with each other. And we're going to see what happens to them over the next five years.

10 years.

10 years.

10 years. Yeah.

And what's the market cap or the total value of the 200? Do you have that number?

I don't have it with me right now, but we do have it. Okay. And, but my guess is it would be, you know, in the 100 billion to 200 billion kind of range. Not unlike the category kings, you know, but probably the 88 for 35. 88 billion went to 35 companies at probably some multiple of that. So it's probably a few hundred billion going to a few trillion.

Right. Which is where I was going. So let's just say it's just to make the math real simple. Would 200 million be a good placeholder for those 200 companies? And given the, the ratios, the exponential ratios of the 35.

Right.

How many companies 10 years from now at what value?

Kings. Exactly right, exactly right. And so my guess is at this point in time, and we are guessing, all of us, every single person in the world on, you know, as category designers looking at this stuff are guessing. My guessing is a quarter. Yeah, I know, you tell me. But my guess is something like that.

50 or less.

50 or less companies get to being king.

Right. So the interesting thing here, it's such a powerful learning. There's 200 legendary companies to get to this stage. How large is the average in this bucket, roughly?

Revenue, certainly market cap wise, well above half a billion. So 500 million, many of them. I think the biggest one is probably 10 billion at this point. So it's anywhere in between that. Right. And then anywhere from sort of five or six years old all the way through to 1213. This. We made some adjustments here because not every company starts a category journey on day one. I mean, we've seen this. Right? We've seen this. Qualtrics is a classic example of that. They were a fantastic company for a period of 10 years as a survey company, self funded, blah, blah, yadda yadda. And then they said, actually we want to kind of really put our foot on the gas pedal here. Sequoia came in, Accel came in, they put in a few hundred million dollars in capital to get from contender to king, and boom. You know, their market cap went from a billion while we were working with them from a billion to 30 billion at IPO.

So of the new 200 you've identified in the report, the aha here is. And again, help me that of those 200 contenders who are all worth half a billion, plus or minus or more, so they're absolutely considered spectacular companies, spectacular startups that are well on a maturity path and have proven a whole bunch of great investors.

I mean, the whole thing, this is a. This is a really classic now. We're not ranking anybody. We're not saying this one's better than that. That's not the intent of this. This is really about, okay, let's find a cohort. Let's find a first cohort of category contenders, understand them. And what we want to do is we want to understand that cohort better than anyone else in the world so that we can actually get clear about, well, what do you have to do as a category designer to move from the contender status or the contender sort of class to become a king? What are the things you can do to create that incredible step up in valuation? And that's a lot of what we wrote about in the book. It was like, you know, there's this thing called category design. There's a whole set of steps that you really should think about taking, and it's about being different, obviously, at the core of this thing. And so, you know, I hope no one takes away from this, is that we're trying to pick a winner, or we're saying, Jimmy's better than Sally's better than Frank. Right. That's not what we're doing, but we are trying to get a very representative sample of category contenders that we can truly study and follow.

Yeah, it's legit. What today we describe as category science. There's data science. Well, this is category science. So the big thing, at least for me, is to help people understand the level of what's at stake. You have 200 companies in aggregate worth or minus 200 billion. That will go down to 50 or less. Somewhere between 25 and 50.

Yeah, probably.

And that bucket will be worth 2 trillion or more.

Probably more like 3 or 4.

Right, okay. So.

And that right there is the game. Because when you come out the other side of that, as you saw from the Kingstat research that we just did that 2004 followed those 2014 to 2, they also increased their market cap by $1.5 trillion. So once, once you become that king, you are already on this trajectory. That's incredibly powerful. So if you can get up this curve and we Used to call it in the category lifecycle curve. Remember that was sort of the developed phase of the curves. When you get up that thing, that's when all of the money's made. And that's of course why the companies that go public between 6 and 10 years have this incredibly powerful tail because they went from contender to king as public companies. Boom. You know, insane amount of valuation created.

So at stakeness is critical. And the most legendary entrepreneurs and obviously investors understand this is the game. Yeah, that, that the category king takes 2/3 of the economics and that even out of a basket of 200 incredible companies, great technology, great investors, great deal, all that stuff. Many of them working hard to be category designers, great go to market teams, the whole fucking thing.

Right.

Somewhere between 50 and 25 of them will break out and become the iconic kings. Kings who are legendarily valuable, who dominate and earn two thirds of a. And it'll be a new market category. It's not going to be one that exists, exists before it's new value creation.

Correct. Where it didn't exist before.

And so the at stakeness is massive because these companies are creating a different future. That different future is going to be massively valuable. And in each category after category, one company is going to take all of it.

That's exactly right. And that is it. And so then if you. So then let's do the, let's do this together. So let's say, okay, so now we've wound the clock forward five years from where we are today. And we look at these 200 companies and we look at what are the patterns or what is the behavior that each one of those companies, you know, sort of exhibited. Right. Let's just say we were able to look back today on that. My guess is one of the key decisions that has to get made by the executive team is are we going to be better or are we going to be different? That's I believe probably the number one question that will show up. Am I fighting over the 24% or am I going to go create the 76%? Like which one of those are you?

And there's so many fascinating things about this. The first one is the undeclared, undiscussed, unchallenged, unconsidered part. From a entrepreneur perspective or from a marketing perspective. When you say those words, entrepreneur, when you say marketing, the assumption is, what that means is we are going to create something better and we are going to launch that better thing into an existing market with existing demand and we are going to use Our better product and our better marketing, our better go to market, our better business model, Magic triangle. And once the world sees that our carbonulator is better than the first generation carbonulator, we're going to win. So the premise always is, assume the market. And even worse, only a fucking madman would enter a $0 billion category.

Right? That's exactly right. And that, that right there is the decision that's in front of, I think, these 200 CEOs. We're going to know how many of them went left or how many of them went right here in five years time, maybe 10 years time. And the reason we know that, Christopher, is because between you and I, we've probably designed, I don't know, 70, 80 categories, something like that. And we've worked with all manner of CEOs at all manner of stages, Right. And one of them sort of, at least for me talking about it personally, one of them that sort of stands out is this company called Qualtrics. If you actually live that time from contender to King, which we have, we've lived that last six years together. We being at my company and our company Playbago and their company Qualtrics, what we saw was we came into a company that considered themselves to be a survey company. In fact, Ryan Smith often used to get pissed off because people would call him survey monkey on steroids. That's what they got called by the market. They were the best.

Also told you who the category king was at the time.

Correct. They were the best survey company. Like, that's the ultimate bad. And so they abandoned the survey market.

That they were in, translation, the category with all the demand that was, to quote George W. Putting food on their families.

And they gave up all of the number one search rankings for survey on Google that very day that they did the lightning strike. And they said, we're no longer in the survey category. We are in a different category.

And they sort of said, okay, you monkeys. Yep, you can win.

Yes.

They did a head fake.

They did a complete head fake. And they said, actually, there's something really important here. Surveys are used. It's like a tool. It's like a Swiss army knife. It can be. It can be used to find different things, usually centered around human factors. How does people feel about something? And so with Qualtrics, we got sort of under the covers and we realized, actually, you're measuring a thing called experience. And we created a new thing called X Data. Experience data. And what happened was all of a sudden you realized, oh my gosh, the problem we're Solving is you're starting to measure the experience that you're delivering. And then they went further and said, actually, we're going to start measuring the experience we're delivering to customers, employees, products, brand and other areas. They became the sort of the four corners of the business, as Ryan calls them. And all of a sudden, that category went from literally zero in 2016 to, well, what I think is in the last quarterly report, it's now a $60 billion category of which at the time when Qualtrics went public, they took 30 billion of that. So you saw that whole thing where a management team said, I am going to do different. I'm no longer competing against SurveyMonkey and Medallion and all of those folks for surveys. I'm going to create a new world. That's what Ryan and his team so magically did.

And we know this because we've lived it multiple times, and we live it in our own lives. When you become the category king in a world that you created, life is fucking great.

Correct? You create the rules. I remember you once. I remember there was a fabulous meeting we were having one time. It's back in 2013. You said, famously, something like, something like, and as the category king, you become the RFP writer for the category. And as you know, anyone who writes the RFP wins the deal. So it's the same idea that you then get to set the context for everything that follows in the conversation.

And the interesting thing about this contender quadrant that you're teasing out is when you understand these dynamics. There's 200 companies, you started with the different versus better. The interesting thing to me about that is what that choice means from a mindset, or if you will, a lens perspective. When we say when you're in that contender mode, I think most human beings, most people consider themselves competitive.

Correct?

You're an entrepreneur, you're a competitor. You know, you probably were great at football or basketball or you were a chess champion. I don't know what the fuck you were. But you're a competitor, right? And when it's game on, there's an intuitive understanding, okay, it's game on. And so what we need to do, and by the way, there are roughly, if I'm not mistaken, 50,000 business strategy books on Amazon. And almost all of them, with the exception of one that you and I wrote and a couple others, are essentially about how to win a competitive battle. That's what they're all fucking about, right? And the interesting thing is in this timeframe, this five year window that gets you to the 610 law that gets you to the trillions, the competitive focus almost always, if not always crushes the company.

Correct. It's the better thing. And I remember this is a phenomenal story and this is where you truly are grateful for the opportunities. When you're taking these journeys with companies, you truly get an insight into something that is quite magical. And I was, along with others from Play Bigger, invited to attend a sales conference. Prior to the first lightning strike for Qualtrics, we had gone through the category design process. We'd developed and created Experience Management as the category, or XM as it's now known. And the salesforce revolted. They were like, fucking hated it. Like, what are you doing?

Because I said, no, I've been on, you idiot. I've been on 200 sales calls in the last quarter. Nobody asked me for that.

Correct, that's exactly right. And by the way, when you typed in Experience management at the time, nothing came up.

Google was empty. Hey, Google's empty, fuckers.

Right? And so what happened was the salesforce revolted. They literally said, if you do this, we are going to walk out. So they, they asked us to come along and help frame the conversation around sort of the category science, which we did. And then I witnessed something that I'd never seen before. And I witnessed Jared Smith, which is Ryan Smith's brother. And Jared was one of the original founders or engineering leaders at WordPerfect. He then went on to famously create the Google suite, which is now a workspace. And so his. He told the story through the lens of an engineer, one of the most respected engineers in the industry. He told the story of, hey, we had the best word processing system by a fucking mile.

And they were the category king. Word perfect. Crushed. Everybody crushed.

The only thing they took over from, from Wang Word Processing. You probably don't even remember that, but I do, okay?

And actually one of my favorite all time expressions, and it still makes me laugh today, when I was coming up, quote unquote, downsizing was big, right? Computer downsizing. And what that meant was moving off of mainframes and minis into PCs and client server and all that. And one of the expressions we heard back in the day around exactly this was companies were coming down off their Wang, right? And every time somebody said we're coming down off the Wang, I laughed like a child.

Well, they were coming down to word perfect on the PC is what they were doing.

So it's called a new category, PCs Crush. The old category called minis.

Correct, Correct. And so Jared told This story. And he said the most frustrating thing for him as an engineering lead was watching Microsoft package, the word processor, the spreadsheet, the PowerPoint or the visual graphics and ultimately email and all that shit into one thing called Office. A new category. It was for the front office folks. It was everything that they needed. It was the four cornerstone applications that they needed to run, quote the front office. That was the end of the story. For this is him telling the story. I did not. I sat in the audience with my jaw open like, oh my God, this guy lived that. That right there, Christopher, is the penultimate in the sense that you have an engineering lead who's a co founder of this company called Qualtrics, who has that level of visibility. And he came up to us, funnily enough, he's quite a quiet guy, but you can see in his eyes, insanely intelligent. Came up to us after one of the category design sessions and says, we came up with X Emmett. And he came up to us and said, I've been trying to tell my brother for about two years that we should do experience management before we walked into the door.

Which is true or which illustrates that a legendary category designer is in part a powerful mirror.

It is, it is. And look, it's easy to look back at the Qualtrics journey and say, oh my God, you know, like, yes, $30 billion IPO, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. The truth is that it's a journey. Like, make no mistake, this is not like, oh yes, and then you do this and you name it that and then boom, it happens. No, this is a day to day activity and you've talked about it a lot on your podcast and I love the fact that you do that. And we talked about it in our book in the early days. This magic triangle is a real thing. The confluence of product capabilities or product design, the competence or the capabilities of the company, whether it's sales, marketing, human resources, whatever it is, and the competence of the category design, that is the problem and framing the problem. Those three things, when they come together, that's when it goes.

Yes. So let's maybe talk about one where it didn't go. Jive software. So as you know, I was on the board of Jive Co. Founded in Portland. Guy that I knew well, took over as CEO, asked me to come in and help. So at the time, what's, what's going on was Facebook's on fire. Facebook's the hottest thing in technology. And the aha that a few of us had, the Jive folks being one of them Was this social paradigm that had emerged was going to come to work, right? And so there was this question of, okay, well, are we going to have a Facebook of work and is Facebook going to do it? Facebook, by the way, did try to do it and they had their ass handed to them workplace, so. Exactly. So there were a bunch of companies. There was Jive, there was this company called Lithium, and then there was this company called Yammer and there was a bunch of other cats and dogs. There was probably 50. But of consequence, it ended up being.

Circling around this one problem of how do you get social in your business, however you say it, right?

And we called it social business. Yammer called it social enterprise was the same idea, right? So to the best of my memory, the way this thing played out was Jive was the first company to deliver a giant point of view and declare social business. Like, this is it, this is the future. There was a point of view as to why it was very powerful. We launched that shit and the entire space went, oh, fuck. Yeah. And I know they did because there was a company called Fuck, I'm going to get it wrong. Acquirer maybe, something like that. They were a Drupal company and they were doing the same.

Acquia.

Acquia, yeah. And they were doing the same thing and I think they were probably ahead of Jive, but they were not well funded and they were, they didn't. Anyway, I knew some folks there and when we launched with this first strike, shit themselves. They shit themselves. And what happens when the category king summons the moxie to frame, claim and name the big thing and to go for it and to be standing in a place that's credible, top tier venture capitalists, wicked ass executives, you know, the whole thing, right? That's where Jive was. And it was incredible. And we could feel it. And having been through it many, many times, it was like, okay, you can feel the electricity in yourself, in your colleagues and in the category, right? So here's what happens. Our CMO had left, so I was on the board. I took the acting CMO job. We spent four months or so hiring a new cmo. We hired this galaxy on her second week on the job. I went to the CEO and said, we'll just call her Sally. Sally needs to fucking go. She's terrible. And he said to me, I can't fire her. I said, yeah, Tony, you gotta fire her. And he said, the board's gonna think I'm an idiot. I said, okay, tell him it's my fault. Tell him I led the Search, blame it on me, fire me, I don't care. We're going to be crushed. He wouldn't do it. That was mistake number one. Because after the first lightning strike, no more lightning strikes. Nothing.

No strike ups, no, nothing.

Correct. And so it was as if David threw the rock at Goliath and then said, just kidding, right? No. Really?

No.

And then here was the other thing.

Let me guess. Product.

Yes. So the big aha how to go from contender to leader is in that plus or minus three year window from a product perspective. A lens that I like anyway is what can we deliver that's the most radically different, the most radically valuable and radically quickly. We need that. And in Jive's case, there were a couple things. One was a mobile product and one was a freemium business model, because that was the rage at the time. We knew it, it was clear as day. So the company, A, did one strike and never did another one, and B, didn't deliver any new product of consequence ever.

Right. And that's the challenge because. And that's what's different about Qualtrics, of course. Ryan. So, powerfully framed problem called the experience gap, the difference between what you think you're delivering and what your customer or your employee experiences. Right. That's a fucking big problem. And that's something people should care about. And every CEO in the world cared about it. They went one step further because they had Jared, who'd lived through the better war and lost. And he said, no, we have to build those applications. If our, quote, survey platform was a billion dollar company, each of these applications had to be 1 to 5 billion dollars. It was customer, it was employees, it was about products and it was about brands. Right? And so. And they did it. They built the products. And it's funny you should mention that because. And I had forgotten the whole story about Jai, but you and I lived through another one together, which was Castlight Health. What a remarkable story that was. Think about that. $27 million in revenue. That's it. Remember when we first started there and they were in the transparency space. Do you remember this?

Healthcare transparency translation? We're going to tell you how much an X ray costs.

Yeah. And who's a better doctor?

Correct.

Right. And so. And I remember the first conversation that we had with their CEO and cfo, and they said, they're putting us in the wrong space. They're putting us in this transparency space. Who's they? And we said, that's for us to do, not for them to do, remember?

And they. And they And a lot of people get confused about this sometimes. I think it's market analysts like Gartner and the like. It was like somebody else decides, okay, that's like walking into a tattoo parlor and saying to the tattooist, you decide what you're gonna put on me and where you're gonna put it.

Right. So. And that's the whole point. That's when the category designers fire up. That's when they get excited, when they hear that language or another one, which is, you know, they're putting us against the wrong competitors. That's another one. We were hearing from them at the same time. It's like, okay, they first of all are a third party. You are the one who has to take responsibility for this. So we actually did some spect. I thought, some spectacular category design work around this thing called the Enterprise Healthcare cloud. You remember that?

Well, of course. I mean, I drink a lot and everything. And the other thing I'll never forget about that is we went into the first meeting with them and we thought we were having a regular category design meeting. And they said, oh, by the way, we're planning to file our S1 in six weeks. And so we designed the new category, which we ultimately called the Enterprise Healthcare Care Cloud. As we were co creating the S1 with them.

Yeah.

And their goal was to raise, quote.

100 million at a billion dollar valuation.

That was their goal. And they doubled that.

No, it was a $4 billion IPO. That was the market cap. Yeah.

And they raised.

They raised 250, I think, if I remember rightly.

Yeah. And I remember the incremental 150 of that word. Incremental. $150 million in cash.

But they fell down the same rabbit hole.

Yes, they did.

There was one corner of the triangle that was missing was called the product corner. And one of the things that. Because it was happening so fast, remember, to your point, it was six weeks between the time we started the category design. We do not recommend this for people. You know, don't try this at home kind of thing. That's a really radically hard thing to do. But we pulled it off. They went out the gate at $4 billion market cap with $27 million. Most people said that was the most spectacular sort of IPO in that time. I think it was 2013, something like that. The thing that we missed was somewhere in one of the product meetings, I will never forget this, one of the. One of the product people said, one of the problems with product guys are having is. Is that we're only got 8% of the people who are using this actually engaged in using it. Do you remember that conversation? And because we were running so fast, it was like, okay, well whatever. That's just one of those things we're going to deal with later. Well, as it turned out, it killed him.

That's called bad signal. That's called fucking up on the product. So just to complete the Jive story. So Jive essentially commits Harry Carey. It was a failure of execution. The table got set and the company threw the opening salvo. It was the right opening salvo. Everybody thought the company was going to win. They just raised a big round from Kleiner Perkins on top of raising money from Sequoia. Everybody was like, oh my God. Oh, I remember the narrative at the time. The press release for the Kleiner raise said that this was the first time since Google that Sequoia and Kleiner did a company together.

I remember that.

And that became a headline. And like, so all of the self fulfilling prophecies around who's going to win, it was Jive. We were anointed, right? So the company doesn't ship any product, we never do the freemium, we don't really do a proper mobile, and there's no follow up on the marketing side. Ultimately I got fired and the dumbass CMO stayed and the whole thing got wrapped around the axle. While all that's happening, Yammer was doing great, but they got a 1.5 or something like that billion dollar offer from Microsoft back when that was a lot of money and they took it, right? And Microsoft did what Microsoft does, which is they destroyed the acquisition. And so here's the incredible. Aha. While all this is happening, Jive and Yammer have educated the world about the category. What's the problem? Do work in this new business way? The new way to work, or what do we call. Yeah, the new way to business. That's what the fucking tagline was, right? And people were getting it. And the world is going native digital and the consumerization of it and all these ideas that were happening at the time. And in the space of plus or minus six months, both Yammer and Jive are gone. They both sort of committed suicide, right? I mean, with all practicality. Well, while that's happening, Slack as a game company wraps themselves around the axle. They got nowhere to go and they decide, well, what about this? And they have a freemium model. They're a pure cloud company. You know, say from a product perspective, they did great. But from a category perspective, once the category sees it, they can't unsee it. And when the people who taught them to see it go away, they still want it.

Right.

And so this goes Back to the 200 contenders. This is the, these are the signatures, right? Right. And this is the personal, emotional, real world story. This is the word perfect story.

Yes.

Versus Qualtrics.

Yes.

This is the jive Yammer versus Slack. My first CMO gig, early days, CRM Vantiv, same thing. There's five or six major contenders. Siebel comes along, destroys everybody, reframes the whole thing. I was on that side of it then and I was like, that didn't.

Feel so good, right?

No, I'm like, hey, I'm the one that does the crushing, not gets crushed. Right. Which makes it all the more painful when you're in it again at a jive and you see it and you know that if we had done these things, I mean, we still might have lost, but we didn't even play, we didn't even go for the shift from contender to category king.

Right. And that, that, that right there. So between. I know for sure in our case, I think we have logged more than a thousand hours, hours of interviews over the course of the last three or four years as we've been exploring this topic with different companies. Like, we've literally interviewed a lot of people trying to get sort of the signatures and trying to understand what are the variables, you know, product. The product design piece of the thing obviously is one big one. And so what's going to be fascinating, Christopher, is I think at least as we have this dialogue going forward, just like we have such clarity around what a king is, the value they create, the kinds of moves they do and how they attract the best talent, all that sort of stuff. I think we're going to start to see some signatures for these contenders show up. And I personally think it's going to be the time when truly the VC industry and the founders and the investors and the employees, even the customers start to understand, oh my gosh, I can see three or four of these contenders coming in my front door. Which one of these am I going to pick? What are the signatures looking for? To join that company or to buy from that company or whatever else and that. And secondarily, I think we have learned a lot about category design for companies that are in this phase. Qualtrics is just one example. I know you're working on a big one at the moment for yourself and so are we others. If we can educate people on a why it's important, what the signature looks like, and then what you should do to move someone from contender status to king, or as we said in our first book, from and to. I think we can unlock literally trillions of dollars in value.

Yes, yes. There's a massive unlock here, which is if you earn the right to be in that group of 200, how do you increase the odds of being in the group of 50 to 25, whatever that range, ends up being in this next cohort?

Right.

And we sort of touched on it. The different versus better competitor versus category. It's natural human sort of instinct to focus on beating the other. The interesting thing is if you're savvy about the other, you don't want to be ignorant of them, but at the same time you sort of say, I don't give a shit. And my favorite example of this, as a big fight fan, there's a big set of fights on tonight, right? There is.

Okay.

So as a fight fan, I watch, I like all the fight bullshit. You know, one of the things we.

Say, the pre game stuff.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. And. And one of the things we love to say today, you know, written a lot in category pirates, is the content about the content is more valuable than the content. Right. So you think about the super bowl, the two weeks of before the Super Bowl.

Yeah, that's the party.

It's really fun. Right, right. And getting into all of it super.

Bowl is usually shitty.

And getting to know the backstory of this running back, who you know or what all the shit. Right. It's all fucking fun. And it's the same thing with all the fight pre bullshit. And I've listened to more fight interviews than anybody probably should ever should. But the interesting pattern, or as you say, patton.

Stop being racialist. I'm an Aussie.

I'm just being ausalushed is there's essentially two kinds of interviews before a fight. They'll say, okay, Jimmy, you know, you're fighting Tommy and what are you going to do if Tommy, you know, tries to take you down? He goes, oh, I've traumatized. I've been, We've been training that. He's really good on the ground. So I'm going to. And they answer the question, that's one fighter. And then the other fighter is, hey, what are you going to try and do if Jimmy takes you down? I don't give a fuck what Jimmy tries to do. I decide what happens in this fight. This is my fight. Jimmy is responding to me. I don't give a fuck. And then you go, oh, I have A window into who's going to win this fight. And so the interesting thing is, if the leadership, if the founders, if the marketing and sales leadership, product leadership can be savvy, aware of the bad guys. But at the same time, it's about customers. It's about their problems and the solution we're envisioning. It's about the way we want to frame it. It's about what you talked about earlier. It's about us writing R for the whole market category. And those bastards at the competition, they're.

Gonna have to respond.

They gotta respond. They gotta sing harmonies to our song.

Correct.

And this to me is one of the biggest unlocks and biggest learnings and biggest mistakes. It is so easy to get hypnotized by what the bad guys are doing as opposed to continuing to evangelize. And what makes it worse, remember our friends at Good Data? Incredible new category hot new opportunity. The whole BI space is transforming as we're going PureCloud and all that stuff, whole new big vision and category launch, that shit, it's all gone within three months. Because they do the opposite of Qualtrics. They don't fail to execute the way Jive did. But what they do is they go, well, there's no demand for this new category. Everybody's asking for Cloud bi. So they go all the way back to Cloud bi. Well, who was the leader in Cloud bi?

I don't remember. Who was it?

I'm thinking those guys in Seattle, they got acquired.

Oh, tableau.

Tableau. Thank you. They were already the leader. So, yeah, of course there was demand for Cloud bi. Tableau created it. And this confusion between demand capture and demand creation and it's lack of understanding that she who creates the demand wins.

Right? And so one of the objectives of this research is sometimes founders and executives and even some VCs, not all, not many of them anymore listen to you and I talking about this stuff and say, those guys, they're fucking bullshit wankers. Like, you know, blah. What? You can't. You could argue with us if you want to, but, you know, 60, 70, 80 category designs later, I think we've seen some patterns. But set that aside for a second. When you see the data, that's when it's really, really, really different. And so that's what a lot of the category contender project is about, is getting enough data. So even the most skeptical investor, even the most skeptical entrepreneur actually gets past, you know, sort of like, oh, yeah, you're right, there is this decision I have to make.

Well, and the other Thing I love about this data set that's so fun is how it triangulates. So it triangulates the research we originally did for play Picker. So the, the quote, quote, quote unquote laws are proving out to hold those.

Laws of physics are actually laws of physics.

And then, you know, God bless Eddie Yoon for being the guy who does this thinking in the kind of S&P 500 consumer world for category pirates. A little while ago he did a set of similar research on. He took the scorecard much like the same view you guys created to get the list of 200 in the cohort. Similar thinking applied it to the Fortune 100 Fastest Growing list over a decade.

Gotcha.

And bucketized them into who's creating categories and who's not essentially. Anyway, the net net of that research, this is for large public companies is the ones who are clearly creating categories. Every dollar of quote incremental revenue growth they get, they get four to five dollars of market cap growth. And I forget what it is for the non category competitors, but like it's 50 cents, it's not one for one. Yeah, exactly. And so the interesting thing is whether you're looking at pre public tech companies or public much more mature big brand names that most people would know, the principles are similar. The exponential market cap jumps are different for hopefully obvious reasons. Correct. But the principles around there's something about the way the world, particularly investors, although in customers as well, they understand what a category king is and they understand that they value it. Looks. Do we love YETI coolers?

I do, actually.

I do too. And YETI is the category king of making the Mercedes of fucking coolers. And who knew that you could sell a $500. What are those fucking things more crazy?

I actually bought one the other day, it was a backpack. It's a cooler on a back, it's a backpack with a cooler on it. I think it was like three or four hundred bucks.

Right. And the average Coleman cooler is like 20 cents or whatever it is.

$25.

Yeah. Right. So at the time people are like, Nobody's gonna pay $500 for a cooler. Well, you don't have anything but category design, do you? Yeah.

And the problem, they think, remember the problem, remember the first ads was like we put a block of ice in here and it lasts forever. Right. So if you've got the problem of going anywhere and all your drinks are warm and all that sort of stuff, you know, and evangelizing that whole thing, then of course you need something that's gonna last forever. In A, as opposed to like 20 minutes with a stupid Coleman. Right. Like that's what they did. And they did a brilliant job of it.

Now I'd be willing to bet that Coleman now has a competitive product called Coleman plus or some other stupid name. Right. And the economics are the same there. And so my point is whether it's, you know, tech B2B, tech B2C or, you know, per Eddie's research that we published, well, the size of the difference is different for bigger mature companies, for sure. The level of at stakeness is similar. One company is going to get a disproportionate amount of this.

Yeah. So here's what I'd like to do is let's get back in a year and see what happened. Let's not leave it five years or seven years like we have this time. Let's get back in a year and say, hey, how are we doing, mate? And let's look at those 200 category contenders. And what we might also do is we might sort of say something like, you know what, there's a few of those companies that actually disqualify themselves off the face. But there's five of these other ones over here that we actually truly think are the category contenders because we're not perfect. Our algorithm is not perfect at selecting these things today. We'll improve that over time for sure. So let's come back in a year, take a look at this.

Yeah. And we'll see the companies who, A, are pulling a jive and failing on execution or who are word perfect, B, who are they think they're playing the right game, we're winning, we're the number one. And then, ooh, the category shifts from individual point products to a platform AKA suite. And it reminds me of that. I have two favorite Gary Larson far sides. And you know, one of them that the guys around the horse and carriages and stuff and, and the flaming arrows are landing and one guy's looking at the other guy and he goes, hey, they're lighting the arrows on fire. Are they allowed to do that? And that's what's going to happen in these 200.

I agree.

Some will light arrows on fire, some will just flame out because they whiff in. The crazy thing about jive was the executive team understood this intellectually and they still couldn't.

Yeah. There's a lot of other variables that go into this success. Like we said in the triangle, the product side, the company side and the category side. Well, cool.

And so we'll be back in a year and update on where these 200 are.

What happened to our 200?

Yes, Al, thank you for continuing to be the meister of category science and doing all this incredible research. And this report is out. We'll have a link to it in the show notes if people want it.

Yeah, we're publishing, publishing this. We also have some other research coming, Christopher, in October, which will be a sort of a superset of this, which starts, that's to speak to other phases of the category, the earlier phases and the latter phases. So.

And you'll come back and we'll do.

This and we'll talk about that in October.

Al Ramadan, I love you, brother Christopher.

I love you too. Thank you for having me.

Of course, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, there he is, the legendary Al Ramadan, my brother from another mother, co author of one of my favorite books of all time, Play Bigger How Pirates, Dreamers and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets. And also, of course, Al is co founder and today CEO of Play Bigger Advisors. You can find him@playbigger.com and there you can also pick up for free, no bs, no crapolo, a copy of their new category science research report which we just unpacked@playbigger.com all right. We would like to thank you. Thank you so much for investing part of your time, part of your life with us. It means the world to all of us. Our friends at Autranet have been building legendary B2B websites in Silicon Valley for over 20 years. If you need a legendary website, check out atre.net. today our friends at Clari help business leaders answer the most important question in business, which is are we going to meet? Beat or miss on revenue. Clari's approach to revenue, collaboration and governance gets all of your revenue critical, important employees, which might be up to half your company working together on revenue. Clariclar I.com go to Clary.com today and learn how to run revenue. Don't forget to pick up your copy of Snow Leopard or a couple hundred copies of it. They make wonderful gifts for your entire company. Today's information is provided to you solely for informational purposes and this oddcast is a sole property of the Lockhead Oddcast Network and we would love it if you shared the shit out of it. If you found any value in today's discussion with Al, why not hit the share button on your podcast player of choice? This oddcast has properties known to the state of California to cause category leadership and radically different thinking. Before acting on any of today's information, please Consult your lawyer, shaman, mystic, yoga instructor, baker, bartender, and of course category designer. Also need to warn you that the creators of this oddcast have absolutely been consuming libations. If it's not legendary, why are you doing it? Remember, somebody's got to win. It might as well be you. Somebody's gonna get that 76%. We are produced and edited by the greatest of all time, Jason DeFilippo. And he has started a new podcast studio and is building a new legendary podcast network. Check out Jason at Jason. FYI. That's Jason, Sarah Knox and Jamie J. Do. Legend. Legend. Legendary technical execution. You're gonna have a podcast. You should learn how to talk. And they build lockhead.com show notes by the handsome and talented GM Simon. The brothers Bobis, RJ and ex do our web development and Cedric Biros does our graphic and web design. We record these oddcasts when we do it over the Internet on Squadcast fm. Our lawyer. Lawyers are weed and Jack. And our accountants are three balance sheets to the win. Remember to spread non obvious thinking and take good care of each other. Spread non obvious thinking and please stay legendary, stay healthy and until we're together again. Folly. You're different.