The #1 Reason Startups Fail: The Existing Market Trap with Al Ramadan
In this interview, Al Ramadan, co‑author of Play Bigger and The Existing Market Trap, explains why traditional positioning—placing a product in an existing market—leaves founders competing for the remaining 24% of market value after a “category king” captures roughly 76% of the market cap. He traces the origins of category design as an implicit discipline dating back to early management consulting, and outlines the “magic triangle” that aligns category design, product design, and company design. Using his own experience with Quokka Sports (digital sports media) and multiple case studies—Qualtrics, ClearMetal, DocuSign, and others—Ramadan illustrates how companies can create, evolve, and defend new market categories, avoid the horizontal tool trap, and navigate the three‑phase lifecycle (define, develop, dominate/decline). He discusses the 13 “deadly sins” that can derail category creators, the importance of problem scope and opportunity size, and how ecosystem strategies (APIs, app‑form models, partnerships) amplify category dominance. The conversation also covers the impact of AI, emphasizing that AI is often a veneer over deeper stack components, and how founders must identify durable versus easily replicable elements. Finally, Ramadan stresses that category design is a company‑wide discipline, requiring advocacy from CEOs to salespeople, and highlights the founder traits—belief, evangelism, and the ability to articulate a compelling problem—that make successful category designers.
Chapters
Positioning, by definition, is putting yourself in an existing market. And so you're already competing with somebody who's designed the category. All our research says that the category king, as we called it in the book, takes 76% of the market cap of a category. So that's already done. You're now fighting over 24% in the scraps.
The Library of Alexandria was an attempt to capture all human knowledge. Fire and war destroyed it. Today, we try again. Welcome to the Library of Minds, where you'll learn the frameworks and mental models of the world's greatest thinkers. And when our conversation ends, yours begins. Each guest has created a digital mind on Delphi that you can talk to anytime, anywhere. I'm Dara Lajevardian. Let's dive in. Alright, everyone, super excited to have Al here, author of Play Bigger, and also his new book, The Existing Market Trap. He is the master in category design, which was not a discipline that I was that familiar with until I met you, and then I was like, ah, this actually makes a lot of sense. How to think about architecting your company such that you become the master of the category that you create. So, very excited to have you here.
Super excited to be here.
Well, let's start in the early days before you actually got into category design. You were the founder of Quokka Sports, which was early in sports analytics. And I'm curious, at the time, before you even realized this was a discipline, did you think about this is building a category at the time, or was it only in hindsight where you realized you were doing something new that required thinking about things differently?
I think category design itself as a discipline has been around for a long time. And people have been doing it for a long time. We just didn't call it something. And if you think about management consulting, it was late 1800s, early 1900s that that category actually showed up as a discipline. It's like that. People have been doing it, and it really works. And it's the idea that people have to go to the aisle to find the product they're looking for, not the other way around. And so your job as a category designer is to build the aisle. And so with Quaker— We were around— this is 1995. New media showed up at that point in time. It was this thing called the internet and this World Wide Web. And it enabled people to experience sport in a really different way. And so we couldn't put— as we say in our latest book, Existing Market Trap, you don't want to put something new into something old, try and fit it into something old. And so we called ourselves digital sports media. Company. That was the first one. In that sense, yes, we created our own category. Then we articulated all of the things about being a digital sports media company, which were different to being ESPN or the New York Times. Yes, we were doing category design at that time. We didn't call it that. We just called it framing ourselves or positioning ourselves in the market.
Do you think timing is still as important because things in AI are moving so fast? A lot of the bets people are making today is that it's just getting better every 6 months.
I think it's about when does the infrastructure and what you need truly emerge at a scalable level so that you can then deliver your thing, your experience, your application on top of that. I think that's really the— in my mind, that's really the critical timing piece here. As you know, we've got, we've experimented with a lot of your technology. I've got a digital twin. We've invested heavily in custom LLMs and all that sort of stuff. We're not there yet. Yeah, we're not there to do something like I do.
Sure.
And so that's going to be the, that's going to be the point of where that, where that tipping point is. I don't know if it's 6 months or 2 years or 5 years. I really don't know at this point. And so knowing, not knowing, but having a good understanding of when that point is is when the value truly gets delivered, and then it goes exponential.
Totally. It seems like part of category design is related to marketing and how you position something. You could have something that is actually similar to what's out there, but you talk about it a bit differently. Then maybe there is more product-led, like it's actually differentiated. How do you think about the difference between those two, and which do you think is more important?
Yeah. In Play Bigger, we talk about what we call the magic triangle. It's this idea that category design, product design, and company design have to be aligned. And it's more about the balance between those three things than it is about any one of those things itself. And so one of the stories we tell in the new book, Existing Market Trap, is about this company called ClearMetal. And in that particular case, it was enough to get an initial category design out there in the marketplace in the early stages. They went from AI for shipping to predictive logistics. That was enough to tip. Everybody over to that new direction. And then probably 2 or 3 years after that, we understood that the customers went from the shippers to the actual retailers. And so the category changed with it, which went to continuous delivery. And the idea that you're continuously delivering stuff. And so that's really the art of category design. And more recently, we talk a little bit about in the new book, we really talk about this idea of continuous category design, this idea that Nothing really ever stays still. Even for CRM or one of these established kind of categories, the truth is that cloud CRM, Benioff disrupted the previous Siebel on a technology sort of shift. And in his case, he just put cloud in front of CRM, which is not unlike mobile phones or any of that sort of thing where you're framing it differently at the start. So it's about the balance between all of those three things. If you don't have a product that delivers on the on the solution or the blueprint, you're screwed. If you don't have a company that can't deliver on the sales marketing execution, customer support, and all the other things, you're screwed. And if you don't have a category that really speaks to the problem and changes the way people think about it, you're also screwed. So it's a combination of all those three things.
Totally. And when it comes to product road mapping and prioritizing what to build, When you're building a new category, a lot of people can kind of try to pull you into what's familiar. So how do you think about prioritizing features and product that reinforce the category itself versus making sure the customers that have come along the way are happy even though they're pulling you in things that are more familiar to them?
Yeah, I don't really think that like that. I think that the product has to solve a particular problem. The category has to articulate that problem in a way that makes people lean forward. I've got that problem. I feel that pain. And so those two things are the same thing. The category is just the other side of the problem. It's the solution side of the problem. And so if you're really good at building product that solves a problem and you're really good at articulating why that problem has bad ramifications or a huge opportunity, you're going to be successful. And that's the combination of category. And then on the company side, being able to make all of that happen is the sort of the third leg of the stool.
Yeah, and what should product teams be asking themselves from a metric perspective?
How you talk about the product in the context of what we call the category blueprint. So where do all of the, if you like, features or components show up in the context of something much bigger? And I'll give you one example we talked about in the existing market traps, this company called Qualtrics. When we first met with them, they were sort of considered to be SurveyMonkey on steroids. Used to piss Ryan Smith off. He hated that term. And he wanted to get out of the survey category. Now, a lot of the features in the survey category amongst SurveyMonkey, Medallia, and Qualtrics at the time were pretty much similar. And so the product organizations of trying to make better features and faster and quicker and cheaper and all that sort of stuff, that's not really the game. What we realized was with a survey, what is it— this is the question we asked the exec team when we did the category design. It's like, when you're building a survey, what question are you actually answering? Like, what is it you're trying to find out? And 9 times out of 10, it's like an experience. Did you have a good experience or a bad experience? And it's like, OK, so. And then the second question you asked was, who has that problem? It's like, well, people who are customer-facing or employee experiences or something to do with a product or a brand or whatever it might be, right? Qualtrics went from being a survey product to being an experience management company. That was the shift. Then when that happened, I'm talking to the product side now, one of the co-founders, Jared Smith, who's a genius, walked in and said, okay people, product team, we now need the platform stuff, which is a lot of the survey stuff, but now we need an application for customer experience, we did an application for employee experience, one for product and brand. So fundamentally, the packaging of all of the technology took a big shift. And with it, surveys went for $50,000, customer experience went for $2 or $3 million. So it was 100 times ASP by just changing the emphasis of where you are in the value stack and what you deliver.
So you had to convince them that they needed it.
Correct. And all great markets start as a $0 billion market. Yeah. That's what we're always looking for.
Sure.
Right?
And your job as in— and Ryan was arguably one of the best ever. And I include everybody in that at explaining to people that there's a gap between the experience you deliver and what you think you're delivering. And unless you know what that is, you're done. Yeah. In this experience economy, you're literally done. And he evangelized that problem for 6 years.
Yeah.
And the market cap went from $1 billion when we started working with them to $27 billion when they went public as a result of that work. So back to the problem side, packaging in the context of this new blueprint that you create for the category is important. The competitive set then changes because Medallia, which was considered to be a good customer experience platform now got pigeonholed as one feature of a much bigger thing, that's hard to get away. It's hard to compete with that. Someone came in and expanded the scope of the category, included you as one box in the category, that's tough. SurveyMonkey got, yeah, you're a feature of a platform. Seriously? That's going to do it?
No.
And so when a sales guy goes in or gal goes into an enterprise account and says, hey, you've got this thing called an experience gap. They're like, yeah, we do. In customers, it's like, yeah, you also have employees and product and brand. And they're like, holy smokes. And so when the competitor goes and said, I got the best customer experience thing, they're like, what do you do for employee experience and product experience? And you're done at that point, right? Right. So if you frame this category in such a way that you are what we call the category king in the book, it's tough to compete against.
For sure. Speaking about broad versus singular features, I saw a chapter in the book, The Horizontal Illusion, and I'm curious because a lot of people say LLMs are great at being horizontal, and then you look at category-creating companies like YouTube and Instagram where anyone could post YouTube videos online. That's pretty horizontal. It's not like just business owners posting YouTube videos online. So I'm curious how you think about when horizontal makes sense, or maybe there's a different way of thinking about it where YouTube actually wasn't horizontal. They were more specific on the what. They were horizontal on the who, but not on the what.
Yeah. In our existing market trap, we talk about the 13 deadly sins, we call it. There's 13 different use cases or problem sins that happen. The horizontal tool trap is one of them. The story about Qualtrics is actually the story in this book because they were a horizontal tool survey for anything. You could survey marine science applications all the way through to customer experience applications. What happened was they said, "Okay, let's pick off the high priority experience problems and let's focus on those and develop applications for those." And that's the escape from the horizontal tool trap is to start by understanding, okay, who has this problem? What's the use case? And then really drilling down because if you can, the horizontal tools like loved by many but strategic for none.
For sure.
And if you can get into the strategic side of the stack, i.e., changing a customer experience in the Qualtrics case, that gives you a 10 or 100 times more value that you can be asking for.
Totally. So in these new categories, you talk about really dialing into the problems. Though I do think with new categories, you sometimes see companies that are almost like vitamins and like a promise for the feature, and sometimes dialing into problems that people don't know they have. And I bring back Instagram and YouTube again because like not everyone thought they wanted to post photos. So like how do you think about— Qualtrics is an example where you can say, oh, you have these experience management problems. What about the other side for things where it's like, this is actually a new problem, or like a new thing I want, it's aspirational. Do you still try to ground into very specific pain points and make them realize they have them?
Yes is the short answer to that. And the great problems that we always love to work on are those that, A, we didn't think we could solve, B, didn't know we had. Like, seriously, they're the two classes of problems that are really exciting to work on. The I didn't believe it could be solved problem is I just got here in an Uber. I pushed a button, and the dude shows up, picks me up, and drops me off here. Before you guys were born, we used to do this thing called a taxi and stand on the corner in New York. And we'd stand there in the rain trying to talk to the dispatcher. We never believed that problem could be solved. Uber came in and said, I can solve that problem.
Yeah. Right?
Now, it also got focused initially on regions in that particular case. It doesn't always have to be use cases in terms of customers or employees. It can be regions, or it could be demographics. It could be problem spaces. And so part of your job as the category designer is to understand, OK, where's the high yield here? Which ones do I go after first?, and then how do I expand, or use an ecosystem to expand? They're all part of the program, and that builds into product and company as well.
Sure. And when you are looking at a company that you are evaluating, that you want to work with, you think they have category design potential, what do you look for in their first 100 customers? Are there any signs that kind of give away, like, hey, this could actually be something?
Yeah.
One of the things we always look for is what we call problem scope or opportunity scope. So how big is this problem? How many people have it? And what are the implications or consequences of this problem? That's really how we start our filter. And if you rank highly on all of those 3 components, we're listening loud. Because generally, problem scope and market cap are highly correlated. And you don't know that. To your point about Instagram, to your point about YouTube, when those conversations first started happening, I remember the Instagram conversation because I was having with my son. He was like 9 or 10 or 11 or something like that at the time. And he's like, you know, Dad, there's this thing you can share all of this stuff with. And I was like, OK, so scope-wise, that's like a third of the world. That's a big number.
Totally.
OK. Problem being solved was communicating with your friends or networking, however you want to describe that. That's a pretty big problem. We used to use email and send photos to each other back in the day. Hard to believe now, but that's what we used to do. And so, OK, solving that problem. The question in my mind at the time was, can you monetize that? Can you actually derive value as the purveyor of the solution? And that was always the question. And that got answered, I think, with mobile in 2007, 2008, something like that. When all of a sudden, everyone said, actually, the mobile advertising model does work. And then mobile phones going to— smartphone emerged in 2007. So by 2009, all of the latent opportunity of essentially teenagers, kids, young people with mobile phones seeking this need to socialize and network, all really big numbers. And then you had this enabler, which was mobile and advertising. So that's that example. YouTube, I'm not as familiar with. Honestly, I never really studied it in detail. But as a user of YouTube, I agree with you. For certain applications, it was definitely the go-to thing. And I'm sure they focused down on those areas to make sure that that workflow or that experience was a good one. And then since they've expanded, now you can pretty much get any movie or anything else through Away, which is an undifferentiated offering relative to all of the other platforms. But yeah, they're already the king.
Enjoying the conversation? Got a question? You can ask Al's Digital Mind. Just check the link in the comments or description. So of the 13 deadly sins, I'm sure some of these are reversible. Are there any that you think are irreversible, that, you know, one-way doors that startups make that completely destroy their potential of being a category creator?
I think anything— obviously, once you're aware of a situation, you can then make changes to it. So I think any one of these 13 deadly sins can be reversed. There are some, however, which are really existential. One of the stories we tell in the latest book, Existing Market Trap, is about DocuSign. Traditionally, people, when you say category design, think, oh, it's all about the early stage. And it's about the first 3 years and all that sort of thing. Certainly, there's lots of deadly sins as it relates to that. But there's also at the other end of the spectrum too. We call it the existential decline. The story is about DocuSign. They were and have been and still are the king of e-signature.
Yeah.
The problem was e-signature has become commoditized. It's available in everything. Adobe Sign's got it. You name it, it's got it, right? I think there's 370 vendors that have e-signature embedded in it, right?
Yeah.
So that's an existential thing, which is like, unless you fundamentally reframe the problem space that you are doing, you're going to be out of business. There's no way out. Sure. And we've seen many, many, many companies fall off the edge of their initial category or the first category, which is why our thinking is more around this is a continuous category.
You're constantly thinking about it.
We did a lot of research for Play Bigger. And for an enterprise company, it's a 10 to 15-year window for a category. The first 3 to 4, 5 years is what we call the define phase, where everyone's kind of searching around the problem, trying to get at what the actual problem is and what the value prop is. The middle is the develop phase, which is when the exponential growth happens. That's when Qualtrics stepped into that. Then there's the decline phase or the dominate phase, which is where DocuSign were. And in that 1/3 of the lifecycle, that's where you're going the opposite way. And there's literally nothing you can do about it other than to step into something new. And so that's one example of an existential decline. There are some sort of like what I would call— we call it the sales hype cycle. There's another one about brand obsession. Those things are, in our opinions, kind of basically wastes of time.
Brand?
Brand and sales obsession. The obsession around sales. They become waste of time because they mask an underlying problem that's not being addressed. And so that's an example. There's another example. The Engineer's Dilemma, which is the story about Clear Metal, is as a software engineer, as a previous software engineer, I always wanted to make shit, sell shit, and everything else was bullshit. That was my mindset. As I've got older and worked with more companies, I've come to understand actually that's not true. That building product is important, but you need to have a solution to something that you're really trying to solve that's valuable as opposed to just building a platform that you really like working on. That's another story. Each one of these stories is examples of some of the frailty of us as humans trying to build businesses.
Yeah, and as you grow and you define yourself as a category king in this initial market, what are new things companies have to do to maintain that? You've worked with Salesforce and MongoDB. Other than product partnerships, what are other ways you can kind of solidify that?
Yeah, there's lots. This is on the company design side of things. Ecosystem development tends to show up pretty early as being a really important sort of part of your overall solution. And I'll just use Qualtrics because we've been talking about that. In that particular case, we felt like we needed to tackle the first 4 applications and make sure we got those right. But we also knew that there was a tail here that might be a lot longer than that. So we created essentially an API that people could build on. And 2 years later, there's 50 different applications built on the platform, which were not customer experience, employee experience, brand, or product. There was all different kinds of experiences.
And you wanted that to happen.
Absolutely, you want that to happen, right? And so we called it an app form strategy, the idea that you have apps plus a platform, but then you want the tail. That's just one example of— how ecosystems can play a role. Also, going into new markets, sometimes you want to go in, in partnership with the players who are already penetrated in those markets. They might be solving a different problem, but they have relationships that might help you. So that's another sort of entry point.
I'm curious how— I saw you talked about this in this book as I was going through the chapters— how a lot of your thinking around category design changes with AI. Because you could be building for a category that actually becomes made irrelevant in 6 months because of GPT-6. So yeah, has your thinking changed about how to evaluate whether something is actually 10-year durable versus 6-month durable?
So there's a chapter dedicated entirely to AI and the challenges that we're all going to face in this world where things are moving at the speed that they are. So now, some of us have lived through previous transformations, the internet being one of them back in the '90s before you guys were born. That was a transformation that was pretty big as well. And what we found with that was that the— if you like, the horizontal framework platform stuff. So one of the fun stories was in 1995, I was at Stanford Business School. And our project was to predict whether or not Netscape going public was going to be a major event. And there was quite a broad group of people, not just technologists, but business people from around the world. There was a few of us, me being one of them, who had experienced the internet with Mosaic and some of the stuff even before that, knowing that this was a fundamentally different medium and that it was going to transform the way we interact with each other, interact with media, all that sort of stuff. And so Netscape comes out. We predicted, I think, it was going to be $50 a share. I think— I don't remember actually the number at the time, but it was something like that. But the question we always had with Netscape was, and how does this actually show up in media, in applications, in enterprises, and all that sort of stuff over time? And our sense was, they're just a veneer to something bigger. And in my opinion, AI is just a veneer to something bigger. And so the question for me is like, how much goes into the veneer and how much goes into the stack for the enterprise or the consumer that's actually being built? And how quickly can the horizontal players fill those voids? My sense— this is just me. You guys know this way better than me. But my sense is that there are some things that are durable in life. And there are some things that are relatively easy to replicate. And the easy to replicate is probably going to get bundled. I'm a huge ChatGPT user and builder. I have an LLM that does custom category designs. I've built it since ChatGPT-3 all the way through to 5. And so I can see the areas where it immediately go, oh yeah, okay, it can do that 5 times faster than I could do it personally. I can also see the areas where it's showing up now that it's like, it's never going to be able to do that. And so that's, I think, the challenge for all of the innovators and you and all of your team is where are those things that are super durable and can actually be leveraged and help us. And I'm talking about now as a user of your platform, help us actually exemplify those areas where the durability and the value is not going to get lost. Compared to the more routine, mundane task. I think that's ultimately where the battle is. Awesome.
A couple more questions. It seems like when thinking about category design, it touches many different parts of the business. It touches how you talk to customers, marketing, product strategy. Are there any other tactical things that not just leadership in a company, but everyone in a company can adopt? To really come around this mission of creating the category, owning it, and dominating it?
Yeah, the answer is everyone in the company has a responsibility for being an advocate for the problem we solve. That's your job. CEO has to do that. He or she has to do that at the keynote. CFO has to do it at the S-1 call. Or the earnings call, or at the all-hands call. The salespeople have to do it with their customers. The marketing folks have to do it. Everyone has to do it. And so it's why we believe that there is a discipline called category design, which starts with identifying what that problem is and the ramifications and who has it and trying to quantify all that sort of stuff. And then creating what we call a point of view. It becomes what we call the source code to everything else in the business. Everything flows from that. It's an internal-facing document, but it Everything that derives externally derives from this source of truth. Then there's a phase after you've got that clear. That's 2 or 3 months into the journey. After you get that clear, you need to mobilize the entire company. We usually appoint category advocates who are all different levels within the organization who are responsible for, if you like, pushing all of this out.
Sure.
Whether it's a sales enablement thing or whether it's a— sort of a marketing activity or an event that's going to happen or a product feature or a packaging issue. Right across the company, these advocates are then sort of pushing into the organization. And it's all about, in the initial stages, about building belief as the exec team. That belief has to spread internally to the entire organization. And then your job as a category designer is actually to build belief in the market, in the minds of the people who have the problem over here. Ultimately, the belief flows that way. Everyone in the company has to be part of this journey.
Last 2 questions. What's a question you wished you were asked more about category design? You work with a bunch of companies, and you're like, "I want you to ask me this question." Yeah, yeah.
First of all, most people, when they walk in the front door, say, "Hey, how do you like my category name?" That's really how the conversation starts. It's like, "Do you like my cat name?" I was like, I don't know. And so I wish the question was, do you think this is a really good articulation of this problem? And do you think I could get in the value chain up here as opposed to down here? That doesn't happen very often. And there's only few founders who really understand that.
And value chain, you mean which people to start with or which—
Yeah, or whereabouts in the value chain. So the example of a survey, it might cost you on SurveyMonkey $20 to run a survey.
Sure.
That's cool. But if you solve a customer problem with customer experience up here, that's worth $5 million. So the differences in where you fit in that value chain or the value extraction is really important. And understanding that at a sort of an innate level. So to come back to the question, very few people say that to me, very few. There are some entrepreneurs who walk in and say that. It's like, OK, that's somebody I want to be involved in. And then there's other sort of what I would call misunderstandings, would be a polite way to sort of say it about category design. Some people say, well, you know, positioning is really important and just as important as category design. And there's a chapter dedicated to it in the latest book which basically puts that to rest, which is positioning by definition is putting yourself in an existing market.
Mm, yep.
Any other questions kind of thing, right? And that ends up being feature battles, speeds and feeds, cost, whatever else. And that's true.
Like the Uber for X.
Right. And so you're already competing with somebody who's designed the category. All our research says that the category king, as we called it in the book, takes 76% of the market cap of a category. So that's already done. You're now fighting over 24%. And the story we tell is there's 365,000 people on LinkedIn with positioning in their title, they're some of the smartest people in the world, and they're fighting over 24% in the scraps. Why? Why would you do that? So that's another question that sometimes we love to answer.
I like that. Last question, if you could have dinner with anyone dead or alive, who would it be?
Shackleton.
Shackleton. Say more.
You know what he did, right?
No.
Ernest Shackleton. Have you ever heard of him? Anyone heard of Ernest? He's the guy who's sailing around the world guy. And he gets stuck in Antarctica. His boat gets stuck in Antarctica. He's got a whole crew on board. The boat's not coming out of being stuck. He grabs a lifeboat, puts 15 men in them, and goes to an island survives a winter there. And then they realize, no, the cavalry is not coming. There's no satellite that says, hey, Jimmy, I'm on an island, this island here, come get me kind of thing. So he takes 5 of the people and goes to the Falkland Islands, lands on the islands. This is around Cape Horn. Lands on the islands in a rowboat with a little sail on it. Eventually has to— figures out he's on the wrong side of the island. There's a whaling station on the north. Hikes across to the north. Finds a ship, goes back, rescues all of these guys who are still alive, and picks up all the trials and takes them all back to England. It's— Ernest Shackleton is one of the greatest explorers of all time, and I would just love to be able to sit there and say, Ernest, like, what was in your mind? What's that mindset that kind of kept you going?
We'll make that happen. All right, let's have another questions. So you talked about—
there's like 2 questions here. So you talked about how Uber, you at the time, like when you were using taxis, you didn't realize that there was like a problem that needed to be solved with that. You just had an existing use that you were doing to get cars. So you think to be able to create a category and like build a company in that area, is there a certain way you have to look at the world to be able to identify new categories or opportunities for creation? And how do you know if you're the person to do it? Do you have to have, like, can any driven, hardworking person be able to do it, or is there a certain archetype of person that can be able to solve that problem?
Yeah, they're great questions. They are really great questions. So I think the first thing is, is as a founder, as an entrepreneur, the good ones are dialed into seeing something that others don't. Either a possibility that we could solve that crazy dispatch problem, which is what we used to call it back in those days. There were companies, literally hundreds of technology companies trying to solve the dispatch problem. Make the dispatchers more efficient. OK? Someone came in and said, wait a second. That's a dumb idea. How about we just have an app on a phone? Now, the iPhone shows up in 2007. And it goes ballistic at that point in time. There's a whole story about that I can tell you— existing markets. I was working with Nokia and many other companies at exactly that time. And so somebody, usually a younger person, sees this thing called a mobile phone that isn't a toy. It was— first Apple, first two versions of Apple were definitely a toy. But they believed that that thing could actually be the place where you could actually do, quote, the dispatching. And there was this thing called a cloud and all that sort of stuff. And so the great founders have the technical understanding of where— what's possible at a technical level. Forget the business constraints. Forget anything else. And then start building belief in their own head firstly that we can solve that problem. And that's what I thought Uber did a stunning job of. The first time I picked up the Uber app and pressed, you know, like come get me kind of thing, and a freaking car shows up, it's like— that was like putting a man on the moon for me. It's like, I can't believe that just happened. I'm a technology guy. I write code. Like, how could that be so far-fetched, right? But we were just all blind to it because we're in an existing market trap. We're trapped in the thinking of the existing markets, right? We're all about sort of like optimizing that. The type of person question, I've— so I have the luxury of meeting with so many of the great entrepreneurs. And the inquisitive ones, the ones who have self-belief and have the ability to build belief in a building— this room as a starting point, then the entire San Francisco, then the entire world— they're the ones that— and Ryan Smith's a great example of that. And I think Dara is an incredible— has incredible capability in that regard. The people who can build belief internally and then have it go external are naturally the ones that are going to be these great category designers, I think. Now, there's counterarguments to that. The guys at Workday were pretty shucksy. Oh, shucks. We could probably make that work. So their style wasn't necessarily that evangelical sort of style. So I've come to understand that it's not just about, if you like, showmanship or how you present or how comfortable you are in front of an audience. But it's that you stay true to this belief that you have. And the founders of Workday had a belief, which is we can automate a lot of this HR stuff and make it a lot easier and better for everybody else. And they just did it in a really aw shucksy kind of way. So the style piece compared to, say, Larry Ellison, who were competing for the same sort of market, very different people, right? But same belief. And that's, I think, the role of the founder. And when we look at founders, we're always looking for, does this person truly believe this? And does this person have the ability to sort of communicate that belief externally? And then they are as much internal questions to you as they are external questions from us, right? Do you believe this? And so let me— can I turn a question back on you? Yeah.
Yeah.
If I can. So do you believe that Delphi, the digital twin, this idea of codifying you is really going to be able to change the way I work?
Yeah. Okay.
Awesome.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much.
Real pleasure.
Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode and want personalized advice from Al, head to the link in the comments or description to ask his digital mind on Delphi.
