Pickleball grew 3x in 4 years to 14M players. Not by competing with tennis— but by creating a new market instead.
AI startups don’t necessarily have to beat incumbents. Some will start entirely new markets instead. Like Canva to Photoshop, Shopify to Amazon or Pickleball to Tennis, many of these won’t even have to compete. They create 10x easier to use products and through that open up an entirely new space. They solve problems people didn’t even know they had. In many cases they expand the market for incumbents too— pickleball didn’t steal tennis players, it became a gateway and created even more...