On Apple, AI, category creation, capital, acquisitions, and learning when not to move.

Apple did something last week that, by most Silicon Valley logic, looks embarrassingly late.

It launched a foldable phone.

Samsung introduced the Galaxy Fold in 2019. Apple waited seven years before introducing the iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone.

SEVEN years.

In startup years, that's roughly three generations of founders, five pivots, two AI transformations and at least one company describing itself as an "OS."

And yet, nobody is looking at Apple's entrance into the foldable market and saying, Well, they missed it.

Because we've seen this movie before.

Apple wasn't first to MP3 players when it introduced the iPod in 2001. It wasn't first to smartphones when it introduced the iPhone in 2007. Tablets existed long before the iPad arrived in 2010, and smartwatches existed before the Apple Watch showed up in 2015.

Apple's superpower has rarely been inventing a market out of thin air.

It's been waiting long enough to understand what everyone else got wrong, then showing up with an interpretation of the market that feels obvious in retrospect.

I've been thinking about that a lot lately, especially as nearly every company I talk to races to reinvent itself around AI.

Because "first-mover advantage" might be one of the most overrated ideas in technology.

There can be advantages to being first, of course. You get attention. You get customers before competitors arrive. You get to help establish the vocabulary of the market. Some research has found meaningful advantages for pioneers.

But there's plenty of research showing something more interesting: innovative late entrants can outperform the companies that educated the market before them. A study by the Journal of Marketing Research found that innovative late movers often create sustainable advantages over pioneers, while other research has found that pioneering truly new markets can carry significant survival risk.

The graveyard is full of first movers who did the market education for someone else's harvest.

And there's is a lesson in that far beyond Apple.

Sometimes creating a category is exactly the right thing to do.

I spent a meaningful part of my career at Gainsight, and one of the things I'm proudest to have experienced there was watching a category get created almost in real time.

Customer Success wasn't invented by Gainsight. I'm pretty sure Salesforce said it first. 

Companies already cared about retention. People were already managing customers after the sale. SaaS businesses were already discovering that recurring revenue made the relationship with a customer dramatically more important than the initial transaction.

The behavior existed. The pain existed. The job existed.

What didn't fully exist yet was the language, community, operating model and technology category around it.

That's an important distinction.

The best category creation doesn't manufacture a problem and then convince customers they have it. It gives a name to something customers are already experiencing but haven't yet organized around.

In that sense, category creation can be incredibly powerful. You help a market see itself.

But category creation can also become intoxicating.

Once you've successfully created one category, it's easy to start believing that every new product, adjacency or strategic idea needs another one.

It doesn't.

Sometimes your product is simply a better version of something people already understand. Sometimes the existing category is perfectly fine. Sometimes forcing customers to learn new vocabulary actually makes your job harder.

And sometimes the desire to "create a category" has less to do with customers than it does with us wanting our company to sound bigger, more differentiated or more interesting to investors and analysts.

There is a massive difference between discovering a category and declaring one.

Capital can make this easier. And it can make it much more difficult.

I've also been fortunate enough to experience the venture-backed and private-equity-backed sides of company building.

Gainsight raised significant venture capital as it built the Customer Success market and eventually received a majority investment from Vista Equity Partners in 2020.

There are enormous advantages to both models.

Venture capital can give a company time to educate a market before the market is fully developed. It can fund product development, community building, brand, sales capacity and all of the infrastructure required to turn an emerging idea into something much larger.

Private equity can bring a different kind of leverage: operating discipline, resources, expertise, acquisitions, financial rigor and the ability to scale something that has already demonstrated real traction.

None of those things are inherently good or bad.

But money changes the clock.

Once you've raised capital, growth isn't simply something you hope for anymore. Increasingly, it becomes something the math requires.

And that changes the questions you ask.

• Where is the next $50 million?
• What adjacent market can we enter?
• What company can we acquire?
• How do we increase TAM?
• What's the next product?
• What else can we sell to the same customer?

Every one of those can be a completely reasonable question.

The danger comes when answering them becomes more important than asking a much simpler one: Are we getting dramatically better at the thing our customers already hired us to do?

Capital is an amplifier.

When the strategy is clear, money can accelerate something extraordinary. When the strategy is fuzzy, money can accelerate the fuzziness.

Acquisitions can be another version of the same trap.

I've become much more cautious about the way I think about M&A for the same reason.

On a strategy slide, acquisitions almost always look beautiful:

• Company A has customers.
• Company B has technology.
• Put them together and suddenly there's more ARR, more TAM, more products, more data and more cross-sell opportunity.

Spreadsheets love acquisitions. Reality can be less cooperative.

You're not just acquiring ARR. You're acquiring architecture, technical debt, contracts, cultures, management teams, customer expectations, positioning, pricing models, sales motions, implementation requirements and promises somebody else already made.

The financial diligence may tell you whether the numbers are real. It doesn't necessarily tell you whether the company belongs inside yours. That takes a different kind of diligence.

You have to understand whether customers actually see the connection, whether the technology can truly come together, whether the teams can operate together and whether integrating the new business will make the core company stronger or simply make it busier.

And perhaps most importantly, you have to be willing to walk away.

That's much harder after you've fallen in love with the strategy deck.

Gainsight used several acquisitions over the years to expand from Customer Success into product experience, community, education and AI, including Aptrinsic in 2018 and inSided in 2022.

Some acquisitions can meaningfully expand what a company is capable of becoming.

But the lesson I've carried with me isn't "acquisitions are good" or "acquisitions are bad." It's that acquiring something doesn't automatically make it strategic. And growth isn't the same thing as focus.

AI is making all of this more dangerous.

This is where I think the conversation becomes especially relevant right now.

AI has dramatically lowered the cost of creating things.

Products can be built faster. Features can be copied faster. Content can be produced faster. Companies can launch faster. Small teams can suddenly attempt things that once required dozens or hundreds of people.

That's incredible.

It's also going to create an unbelievable amount of stuff nobody needs.

We already have AI agents, copilots, assistants, workspaces, brains, operating systems, intelligence platforms, agentic systems, orchestration layers and probably six new categories somebody announced while I was writing this sentence.

Everyone wants to be first. Everyone wants to create the category. Everyone wants to declare that the old way is dead.

But when building becomes easier, building stops being the scarce resource.

Judgment becomes scarce.

Taste becomes scarce.

Focus becomes scarce.

Knowing what not to build becomes scarce.

And understanding which customer problems actually deserve a company built around them becomes much more valuable.

AI doesn't eliminate the need for strategy. It makes strategy more important because the penalty for pursuing a bad idea has changed. We can now move incredibly fast in the wrong direction.

Which brings me back to Apple's foldable phone.

The interesting question isn't whether Apple was late.

It clearly was.

The interesting question is whether foldable phones represent a large market that needed better execution or a niche that remains a niche no matter whose logo is on the hinge.

Even now, that's not entirely clear.

IDC expects foldables to represent only about 3.1% of global smartphone units sold by 2030. But because these are premium devices, IDC expects them to account for a much larger percentage of smartphone revenue...potentially 10% in the same period.

Maybe Apple transforms the category. Maybe it simply captures the profitable end of a relatively small one. Either outcome could be a perfectly good business.

And that's another lesson companies forget: not everything has to become a giant new category to be valuable.

Sometimes a niche is a great niche. Sometimes an adjacency is a great adjacency. Sometimes the smartest strategy isn't to convince the entire world that a new category exists. It's to make something incredibly useful for the people who already want it.

I think I've become less impressed by "first."

Earlier in my career, I probably put more value on being early.

Being first sounded innovative.

Raising more money felt like validation.

Entering another market felt like ambition.

Launching another product felt like progress.

Doing an acquisition felt capturing a flag.

Creating a category felt like leadership.

And sometimes those things are exactly what a company needs.

But after watching companies scale, markets evolve, categories emerge, acquisitions happen and capital change the expectations around businesses, I think I'm much more interested now in something less exciting:

Being right.

Not perfectly right. Nobody gets that luxury. But right enough about the customer, the problem, the timing and the market that all of the other things (capital, product, AI, acquisitions, brand) become accelerants instead of distractions.

That's one of the things I'm trying to carry into what I build next.

Don't create a new category just because you can give something a clever name. Don't raise money simply because someone is willing to give it to you. Don't acquire a company because the spreadsheet says one plus one equals three. Don't add products because more TAM looks good on a board slide. And don't mistake your ability to build something quickly with evidence that somebody actually wants it.

AI is going to make us faster at almost everything.

I'm increasingly convinced that the advantage will belong to the people and companies disciplined enough to occasionally move slower.

To watch. To learn. To let somebody else make a few mistakes. And then, when the market tells you something real, to move with conviction.

The market doesn't give you extra credit for being first. Eventually, it just cares whether you got it right.