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Can you ever really own an idea?  The publishers, music producers, and film directors who make up the creative economy would say yes — as would many of the artists and writers they work with. But some in Big Tech are beginning to push back, arguing that ideas—like information—should be free, accessible, and repurposeable for anyone. When it comes to ideas, they argue, even those which spring directly from our own heads are the product of every other idea, environment, and person we’ve come into contact with. As such, they are fair game for training the large language models (LLMs) behind the AI platforms many of us have become reliant upon.

The argument has become increasingly urgent as generative AI companies build powerful models—and attract huge investment—by ingesting vast amounts of online text, images, and video, including books, journalism, and art created by humans.

This is the existential issue facing, among others, the international publishing giant Hachette, publishing since 1826. David Shelley, the company’s U.K. chief who also became U.S. CEO in January 2024, is joining the fight on behalf of creatives everywhere.

Shelley is a publisher through and through. The son of antique booksellers, he grew up above a bookshop and got his first industry role fresh out of university. You would be hard-pressed to find someone more passionate about, and invested in, the future of publishing. “We’re at an absolutely pivotal moment,” he says. “We need to stand up for the rights of the authors we work with and for the whole of the creative industries.”

This is not mere lip service. This January, Hachette asked a U.S. federal court for permission to intervene in a proposed class action lawsuit against Google. Along with Cengage, an education technology provider, the publisher claims the tech giant copied content from Hachette books and Cengage textbooks to train its large language model, Gemini, without asking permission. Google argues that training LLMs on vast text-based datasets is a transformative process which analyzes patterns in language, rather than reproducing the original works and, as such, qualifies as fair use.  Shelley isn’t buying it. “It’s just another form of theft,” he says. “We know these LLMs basically stole our authors’ work.”

This isn’t the first time Hachette has taken legal action against those looking to steal from it.  The Google lawsuit is just one of many examples of creatives taking on Big Tech. Across the U.S. and Europe, dozens of lawsuits have now been filed by individuals and organizations seeking to stop AI companies from training their models on copyrighted material without permission.

And here is the crux of the issue. Someone is making money from the use of these ideas—but it’s not the author, it’s the LLM companies. The commercial stakes are enormous: the global generative AI market was valued at $103.58 billion in 2025 and is projected to be $161 billion in 2026, according to Fortune Business Insights.

One logical conclusion is a return to the early days of publishing, when only the super-wealthy (or those lucky enough to have a rich patron) could afford to write for a living. Whether it is writing or music or illustration, “the fact you can make a good living in all of these fields is a really strong incentive,” says Shelley. Without the economic model, “the  talent pool shrinks.” 

Worse still, we face a future where the only art available is an iteration of an iteration on an iteration. “LLMs are just predictive text,” says Shelley. “If you starve the supply, then there will be no new stories. As humans, we need new stories, we need new art, we need new ideas, and to get that, the economics need to work for the people who make those things.”

What is most frustrating for Shelley is that there already exists a robust mechanism for ensuring this doesn’t happen: copyright law. “Copyright essentially exists to ensure creators are able to earn a living,” he says. “I don’t think it needs to change, but it does need to evolve.” 

Shelley is also realistic about the need to work with Big Tech in order to achieve Hachette’s mission (“to make it easy for everyone to discover new worlds of ideas, learning, entertainment, and opportunity”).

Neither can companies afford to shy away from the transformative potential of AI, however cynical they may be about the motives of the platform owners. For Shelley, the key is to have very clear boundaries from the start, about where the publisher will and will not use the technology.

Indeed, there is a growing trend on both sides of the Atlantic for using human creation as a badge of honor. In early 2025, the U.S.-based Authors Guild launched a “Human Authored” certification, with the U.K.’s Society of Authors following suit in March 2026. The certification allows for minor AI assistance—such as spell-checking or brainstorming—but the text itself must be human-written.

As with the hipster revival of the word “artisanal” in the mid-2000s, the AI age is beckoning in new terms to connote great value and desirability. Now, instead of coffee made from rare Southeast Asian beans or blankets knitted in little-known Nordic communities, the focus is on content. From books to marketing campaigns, experts suggest that, in a world flooded by AI-generated work, those who can will pay for what is being called the “human premium” by some thought leaders.  Of course, business leaders must play their part in protecting the economic ecosystem that makes this possible.

Here, again, is an issue which appears, on the surface, to be unique to the publishing industry, but which could have severe consequences for businesses of all sectors. For Shelley, freedom of expression is no longer merely a cultural issue—it is a leadership and governance one.

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Entering 2026, record-breaking investment in semiconductors, cloud services, and AI software and services is poised to transform how global companies create value. This fast-growing “AI foundation” for business is accelerating the growth of digital ecosystems and enabling new physical-world applications, from space and robotics to drones and other forms of “physical AI” that sense, decide, and act in the real world. At the same time, novel weight-loss therapies are reshaping pharmaceutical pipelines, electrification is advancing steadily, and geopolitics is increasingly influencing how critical industries are built up and protected—particularly through technology sovereignty and supply chain resilience policies.

The McKinsey Global Institute previously identified 18 future arenas of competition—from AI services to space—that are increasingly writing the global growth story. Indeed, over the past three years, these 18 industries have grown roughly four times as fast as other industries in market cap and ten times as fast in revenue. Arenas are, by definition, the fastest-growing and most dynamic industries. As their scale and reach into the broader economy expand, it is fair to say that we are all in these arenas now.

Since 2022, an “AI foundation” set of industries—semiconductors, cloud services, and AI software—has added $500 billion in revenues and $11 trillion in market cap. Infrastructure demand and investment have escalated rapidly in anticipation of AI deployment orders of magnitude larger than today. Companies that design and deploy computing power at scale have so far accrued most of the increase in market value and profit.

Meanwhile, growth continues to surge in digital industries, while many physical arenas are poised to take off. Digital industries, such as e-commerce and digital advertising, are capturing a growing share of the attention economy, especially in emerging markets, even as chatbots reduce open-web traffic and agentic commerce creates new competitive fronts. Other arenas continue to escalate at varying paces, from robotaxis rolling out in dozens more cities worldwide to obesity drugs that are now six out of every 100 US prescriptions.

Nine large competitors—referred as “omniscalers”—are spending heavily and spanning multiple arenas. The nine omniscalers collectively generated over $700 billion in operating cash flow in 2025 and invested more than $800 billion in R&D and capital expenditures that same year. Their capabilities and financial capacity compound as they compete in arena after arena, expanding to generate revenues in as many as nine arenas.

Companies headquartered in the United States and the Greater China region account for 90 percent of arenas’ market value today. US companies lead in 14 of the 18 arenas in market cap and ten in revenues. But China is gaining ground, especially when measured by revenue shares. The rest of the world stands by—for now.

For companies competing in or anywhere near future arenas, blind spots may be widening. Traditional strategy tool kits are no longer adequate, and the risks and rewards of getting it right are ever increasing.  For any CEO, the central question is whether exposure to arenas will improve the fundamental drivers of value in the business: returns on invested capital and growth. The authors generally see four foundations that underpin long-term value creation from strategy; they are ROIC and growth as the financial drivers, managing for the long term, market attractiveness, and competitive advantage.   The opportunities and demands of arenas intersect with all four.

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For small entrepreneurs in the US, deciding what to sell and where to make it has traditionally been a slow, labor-intensive process that can take months. Now that work is increasingly being done by AI tools like Accio, which help connect businesses with manufacturers in countries including China and India. Business owners and e-commerce experts told MIT Technology Review that these AI tools are making sourcing more accessible and significantly shortening the time it takes to go from product idea to launch. 

McClary, 51, who runs his business from his Illinois living room, has sold products ranging from leather conditioner to camping lights, including one rechargeable lantern that brought in half a million dollars. Like many small online merchants, he built his business by being extremely scrappy—spotting demand for a product, tweaking existing designs, finding a factory, doing modest marketing, and getting the goods in front of customers fast. 

This time, though, he began by telling Accio about the flashlight’s original design, production cost, and profit margin. Then Accio suggested several changes, making it smaller and slightly less bright and switching its charging method to battery power. It also identified a manufacturer in Ningbo, China, that McClary said could cut the manufacturing cost from $17 to about $2.50 per unit.

McClary took the process from there, contacting the supplier himself to discuss the revised design. Within a month, the new version of the Guardian flashlight was back up for sale on Amazon and on his brand’s website.

Although Alibaba is better known for owning Taobao, the biggest shopping site in China, its first business was Alibaba.com, the primary website that lists Chinese factories open for bulk orders. Placing an order with a manufacturer usually requires far more than clicking “Buy.” Sellers often spend days or weeks browsing listings, comparing suppliers’ reviews and manufacturing capacities, asking about minimum order quantities, requesting samples, and negotiating timelines and customization options. 

But Accio has gained significant momentum by changing how that sourcing gets done. Launched in 2024, Accio exceeded 10 million monthly active users in March 2026, according to the company. That means about one in five Alibaba users consults with AI about product sourcing.

Zhang Kuo, the president of Alibaba.com, told MIT Technology Review that the tool is built on multiple frontier models, including the company’s own Qwen series, a popular family of open-source large language models. The system is able to pull from the site’s millions of supplier profiles and is trained on 26 years of proprietary transaction data.

But the tool has clear limits. One of the regular users says Accio is strongest when it comes to product ideation, but less helpful on marketing questions such as advertising and social media outreach. To use it well, he says, buyers still need to challenge its recommendations, since some can be generic.

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In a perfect world negotiators always have a plan B. In the negotiation literature this is called a BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement), a term introduced by Roger Fisher and William Ury in their 1981 book, Getting to Yes. The concept has several key implications: You shouldn’t agree to any deal if there’s a better alternative; you shouldn’t expect the other party to agree to your deal if it has a better alternative; you should seek to improve your BATNA; and you should at least consider if and how to weaken the BATNA of your negotiation counterpart.

In many of the most important and challenging business negotiations, however, there’s no obvious solution other than a deal with a specific party. Because of that, it feels as if there’s no plan B.  Indeed, knowing what to do when there seems to be no plan B is one of the unique strengths of the most experienced and skilled dealmakers. In high-stakes negotiations there often are creative work-arounds, unilateral actions you can take to improve your leverage, and partial alternatives that can shift the balance of power.  In this article the authors take us through the right ways to approach this challenge.

The Power of Partial Alternatives.  When negotiators map out their BATNA, they often search for a complete alternative that addresses every problem. But in many cases such a solution simply doesn’t exist. Instead, the breakthrough comes from identifying options that may not fully replace the deal on the table but can open up new possibilities. These partial solutions, even if limited, can change negotiation dynamics in meaningful ways.  The more complex the negotiation and the more dependent you are on the other party, the more important it is to seek out partial alternatives.

Don’t Negotiate from a Place of Fear.  When you feel as if you have no alternative, it’s natural to focus on your own vulnerability and overlook the chinks in the other side’s armor. Even experienced negotiators can fall into this trap, fixating on who “needs the deal more” and missing opportunities to gain leverage. But when you broaden your perspective—analyzing not just your own BATNA but also the other party’s alternatives—you often discover hidden strengths in your position.  Even if your alternatives look bleak, it may still be rational for the other side to make concessions. Dependence in negotiations is rarely one-sided, and feeling vulnerable doesn’t mean you lack leverage.

Seek Temporary Alternatives and Tacit Consent.  In situations where the search for a plan B continues to come up empty, expanding your analysis to consider what you can do, even just temporarily, without the agreement of the other side is often the key. When a powerful counterpart says, “Take it or leave it,” even highly experienced negotiators often feel pressured to agree to an unfavorable deal or to walk away and face the equally unattractive consequences of no agreement. But there’s virtually always a third alternative, at least for a while, to decline to agree but not outright reject the other side’s demands. Even when the other party views a refusal to immediately agree as equivalent to permanently walking away, you can usually reframe your response as simply declining to agree right now. Of course, aggressive negotiators will often couple a demand with a deadline. In our experience it’s almost always possible to extend such deadlines, especially with a reasonable justification, often some variation of “We need more time to evaluate and consider.”  It can also be useful to explore ways to move forward without explicit agreement. Ultimately, you can’t have a deal unless the other side agrees. But there are different kinds of consent, and in practice we’ve found that distinguishing between active and tacit consent is very useful. Not every action in a negotiation requires the other party’s formal approval. In many cases you can act as long as your counterpart doesn’t object. Understanding when you can rely on tacit acceptance rather than waiting for a clear “yes” gives you more room to maneuver.

Focus on the Players and the Process.  When there seems to be no plan B, negotiators should consider literally anything they can do unilaterally that will help yield a more favorable outcome. The authors call these procedural alternatives, as opposed to alternatives to an eventual agreement. To uncover them, you need to keep the principal-agent distinction top of mind—that is, distinguish between the company you’re negotiating with and the individual people you’re dealing with.

Reframe Threats as Warnings.  Communicating walk-away alternatives during negotiations is a delicate art. If a negotiator says something like “We’re considering deals with other partners,” it usually leads to a downward spiral of arguments over who has a better BATNA and then devolves to “take it or leave it” threats.  So people working on high-stakes deals face a tension between signaling that they’re able and willing to walk away and trying to draw the other side into a collaborative negotiation process. The solution to this quandary is to frame the possibility of alternatives as warnings, not as threats. The latter are coercive (“If you don’t agree, we will immediately cut off all shipments to you”) and invariably trigger defensiveness and counterthreats. Warnings, in contrast, are focused on self-protection, not harming the other side, and thus are far less likely to evoke an adversarial reaction. (“We can’t afford to pay the price you’re demanding. Unless we can negotiate something more reasonable, we’ll be forced to find someone else.”) The distinction is simple, but its application is nuanced.

When All Else Fails, Try Fairness.  Negotiations are often framed as a zero-sum game: “Whoever cares least about the deal has the power.” But when the stakes are high, that mindset is limiting. If you don’t care, why negotiate at all? The real challenge isn’t caring less—it’s finding ways to make the other side care more.  One effective approach is to shift the conversation from power to fairness, which is a surprisingly compelling human motivator. While it has been proven in experiments that dealmakers often will walk away from agreements that make economic sense if they perceive them to be unfair, experience shows the flip side holds true, too: People will sometimes make concessions when forced to acknowledge that they’re treating the other party unfairly.

Ideally, you’d be able to identify a viable plan B for all your deals. But when there really isn’t one, adopting an expanded view of power and alternatives can make all the difference. Even if you absolutely must end up with a deal with a specific counterpart, you still have options, and there are often ways to reduce (albeit not eliminate) your dependence on the other side. The best negotiators are those who look beyond the obvious and find creative sources of leverage to influence the negotiation process and their counterparts.

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Every leader wants to believe that their company is prepared to handle a crisis, but when one occurs, it often reveals the weaknesses at the heart of an organization.  But not every.   This leads to an obvious question: Why do some organizations freeze in the face of a crisis while others spring into action and skillfully minimize the damage?  

The authors posed this question to leaders who have faced high-stakes disruption firsthand. Our interviews included individuals who have served in high-ranking political, military, and government roles, as well as senior executives at major global companies.   Based on their insights, the authros identified seven capabilities that any organization must develop to withstand a crisis. Because most organizations have these capabilities, if only in a partial or uneven form, they also define what each capability looks like in terms of its level of maturity.

The Seven Core Capabilities of Crisis Management

1. Contingency. Preparing for what might happen and defining roles upfront so that people know what to do when the crisis hits is critical to surviving a crisis.
2. Clarity. Transparent and clear communication is essential in a crisis. This does not mean spinning disaster into a polished press release; it means communicating early and honestly. 
3. Coordination. Effective leaders connect silos before a crisis. They build trust and a rhythm of collaboration so that when things go wrong, everyone can act as one and as needed. 
4. Compassion. Showing genuine empathy for all who may be affected by the crisis, both inside and outside the organization, builds credibility and confidence and, critically, buys time to deal with the situation. 
5. Confrontation. Leaders must face the hard truths early. 
6. Control. Good leaders maintain order in a crisis. That doesn’t mean centralizing every decision; it means defining decision rights in advance, clarifying who decides what, and empowering those closest to a situation to act when needed. 
7. Continuity. The best crisis managers don’t just move on once a crisis has faded. They run postmortems, capturing lessons that can help them build resilience and make the organization better prepared for the next crisis.

Each of the seven core crisis management capabilities can be seen as developing over the following five stages of maturity.  Level I Reactive (Ad Hoc Response).  Level II Aware (Basic Planning).  Level III Defined (Structured Execution).  Level IV  Integrated (Aligned and Embedded).  And Level V Strategic (Continuous Resilience).

It’s important not to view this simple framework as a checklist. All of the capabilities must be in place to some degree because they reinforce one another and together make a system more resilient. Contingency without clarity breeds confusion; compassion without confrontation leads to inaction; control without coordination creates bottlenecks. Each element constrains or amplifies the others. Organizations that survive crises have these seven capabilities in place, supported by strong organizational routines and culture.

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Late on a Thursday night in the spring of 2014, actor Tyrese Gibson went live on Facebook with Dr. Dre to celebrate the sale of the company Dre cofounded, Beats electronics, to Apple for $3.2 billion.  

The 61-year-old Dre—born Andre Romelle Young—never forgets how far he’s come from his childhood in Compton, Cali­fornia, where he grew up with a teenage mother and an abusive father during the height of Los Angeles’ gang violence and crack cocaine epi­demics. “I had no problem going to cut grass just to buy shoes when I was younger,” he says of his childhood. “I would do what I had to do just to get what I wanted.” Despite his wealth, he swears that nothing in his career has been motivated by money and instead credits his success to an obsession with creating perfect products, whether it’s music, headphones or his latest venture, a gin brand.

“I don’t chase money—I try to make the money chase me,” says Dre, who ranks No. 20 on Forbes list of the Greatest Self-Made Americans. “I’ve always been able to bet on myself, and whatever I do and wherever I go, I know I have my talent with me.”

The money he has earned has afforded him the ultimate freedom, Dre says, especially after his divorce in 2021 from Nicole Young, his wife of nearly 25 years. He can fill his time now doing whatever he wants. Some of it he spends relaxing, of course, but more often he’s chasing after the next big thing.

hose who have spent time working with Dre, whether in the studio, at Beats or on another venture, know his process can be painstaking and that he doesn’t stop tinkering until he feels a project is good enough to release.

“Time doesn’t exist with Dr. Dre,” says frequent collaborator Eminem via email. “He isn’t focused on dates or deadlines or when something should come out—he’s only thinking about whether something is ready.  For instance, on [Dre’s] 2001 album, I thought it was ready before he got ‘Still D.R.E.’ [recor­ded]. And then I realized if Dre thought he was done, the world would have never heard it.”  Sometimes the world never does. After working on his highly anticipated album Detox for more than a decade, Dre scrapped the project entirely in 2015, reinforcing his reputation as a perfectionist.  “Perfectionist is sometimes just a word I use to buy time,” he says. “If I have a release date and the song isn’t right, am I supposed to turn it in? No, I’ll take the proper time until it’s right.”

Opportunities to boost his earnings always glimmered, with many brands hoping to get him to endorse them. He remembers seeing Iovine walking down the beach in 2006 in Malibu where he asked him whether he should consider launching a shoe line. “I just looked at him and said, ‘Man, what do you got to do with sneakers?’ “Let’s do speakers.”  The two became partners in Beats Electronics, manufacturing premium over-the-ear headphones at a time when the most popular style was the cheap earbuds that came free with the purchase of iPods and iPhones. Dre brought his same meticulous attention to product testing as he did to his music, honing a bass-boosting audio mix that he believed delivered a superior listening experience. Combined with Iovine’s marketing savvy, the brand took off immediately. Beats headphones were featured in the music videos of Interscope artists and on the heads of Team USA’s basketball team during the 2008 Olympics—an effort led by LeBron James, who was given a small piece of Beats equity to become an ambassador. Soon Beats by Dre became more than an audio accessory—they were a status symbol, similar to Nike’s Jordan brand revolution. The company grew from $180 million in sales in 2009 to $860 million in 2012, according to Forbes estimates.

Beats expanded beyond hardware in 2012, acquiring music streaming service MOG for an estimated $14 million. Dre and Iovine used the infrastructure to launch Beats Music in 2014, aiming to be a streaming competitor to Spotify and Pandora and, ultimately, a better acquisition target. Given how much his estimated 20% stake was potentially worth, Dre laughs at the idea that he would ever hesitate to sell. “That was easy,” he says. “That was, like, the best thing ever.”

Apple’s eventual $3 billion purchase of Beats is still the largest acquisition in the company’s history. Part of the logic behind the estimated $100 million each in stock for Dre and Iovine—and its four-year vesting schedule—was to bring them into the executive team that transitioned Beats Music into Apple Music in 2015.  Dre left Apple in 2018.

Looking for a new challenge, it was Iovine who once again supplied the idea. Talking with Dre and Snoop Dogg one day in the studio, he asked why they had never tried to turn their 1994 hit “Gin and Juice” into a physical product. “Gin is a lane of alcohol that doesn’t really do well,” Snoop tells Forbes, “so we chose a lane that doesn’t do well, so we can excel.” Adds Iovine: “Dre said, ‘We could kill that,’ and so did Snoop. And then the march to quality started.”

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Accroding to the he knows two people who recently tried to start their own businesses. (They kept their full-time jobs, an approach Arnold Schwarzenegger and Richard Branson both recommend.) Despite their best efforts, both of their businesses failed.  One of them immediately launched another startup. The other vowed to never test the startup waters again, a reaction that objectively makes sense.  

Why is one person so willing to start another business after the previous business failed? Why is someone willing to spend months training for a triathlon just to get a finisher’s medal that is probably worth (in real-world terms) a dollar? Why was I willing to spend close to 100 hours digging into a dune so I could built a deck?  That phenomenon is what psychologists call the effort paradox: where effort adds meaning to the completion of a task, and sometimes is the goal itself. A Harvard Business School study calls it the “Ikea Effect”: the idea that “labor alone can be sufficient to induce greater liking for the fruits of one’s labor,” and that people assign “significantly more value to objects they imagined, created, or assembled.”

Trying, and failing, and trying again to be an entrepreneur? The effort alone is worth a lot to that person.  So why do some people keep going, and others decide the effort just isn’t worth it? Why are you sometimes willing to keep going, and other times not?  The difference may lie in their, and your, definition of success. While it sounds obvious, we all work hard for some sort of reward. Extrinsic rewards like money, prestige, or recognition. Intrinsic rewards like fulfillment, satisfaction, or self-worth. Effort should result in something, so we tend to reward ourselves for success. 

What if, instead of seeking an outcome that is partially outside your control, you choose a goal completely within your control? What if you see the goal as doing all the work?  Take that approach, and a study published in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences found that rewarding yourself for effort instead of outcomes increases your preference for (and willingness to undertake) more demanding tasks in the future.

Think of it as the difference between fixed and growth mindsets. According to research on achievement and success by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, most people tend to have one of two mental perspectives where talent is concerned.  People with a fixed mindset tend to focus on outcomes. If I fail, it’s because I’m not smart enough. Not skilled enough. Not talented enough. Not something. The outcome is the reward… or in least effort terms, the signal to stop trying and give up.  People with a growth mindset tend to focus on the effort itself. If they fail, that’s just a sign they need to keep trying. The effort, at least in part, is the reward, because they trust the effort will eventually lead to something.

The next time you tackle something difficult, reframe the finish line. Say you’re trying to land a new customer. No matter how much effort you put into it, factors outside your control may cause the customer to say “no.” Shifting priorities. Budget constraints. Lack of final authority. Try as you might, you can’t totally control the outcome.

See the effort as the finish line, not the outcome.  That way the effort will be your reward, and will motivate you to keep going, keep improving, and keep working hard. And will help you feel better about yourself; according to a University of Toronto study, finding meaning in effort and not just outcomes leads to feeling a greater sense of purpose, meaning, and overall life satisfaction.  Which in itself is a wonderful outcome, and reward.

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Venture capitals are not chasing safe investments. They always want to chase outsized returns that companies like Google, Uber or Airbnb delivered. However, that only happens when a business builds a real moat and fundamentally disrupts its space.  Often, that means investing in ideas that feel a little uncomfortable at first. It’s hard to wrap your head around a shift as radical as Uber’s before it actually exists; it’s like trying to explain the concept of taxation to a fifth-grader — they may get the idea but not really understand it. And when you invest in a thesis, you aren’t just pitching a product; you’re proposing a fundamental change in how people behave and how entire industries operate.

As a fund manager, he spends most of his day diving into these deals and tracking market shifts. It’s easy to get starry-eyed when a motivated founder promises the next “big” revolution. To stay grounded, he has developed a specific framework to ensure every opportunity actually hits the mark.

1. The company is a disruptor, not just another competitor.  Most startups are competing in an existing market. They may build a better version of something. Maybe it is faster, cheaper or easier to use. That can still produce a successful company, but it is not what investors are typically looking for. Investors look for disruptors.   A disruptor changes how an industry works. It forces competitors to rethink their entire model.  According to the author, when he evaluates a company, I ask myself a simple question: Is this business competing inside the system, or is it changing the system? Investors are usually interested in the second category.
2. The company is doing something that has never been done before.  Innovation gets talked about constantly in the startup world, but true innovation is rare.  Many companies describe themselves as unique, but when you dig deeper, you discover several competitors doing something very similar. It’s easy to think about “can” being done, founders often forget how difficult it is to migrate customers from other platforms or build the kind of momentum it would take to turn profitable numbers.  What many investors and I look for are companies building capabilities that simply did not exist before. That might involve automation, advanced technology or a completely new approach to solving a problem.  Then the challenge is to determine whether there has been a precedent. If so, the company is likely optimizing an existing market. If not, they are likely pioneering a new one, which is also great news. This nuanced conversation is essential for investors to grasp, because the largest market caps are almost always built on entirely new categories.
3. The innovation dramatically improves scalability and cost efficiency.  Even the most exciting technology does not matter if the economics do not work. Investors pay close attention to whether a company’s innovation changes the cost structure of an industry.  The best businesses do not just grow revenue. They make something dramatically more efficient.  According to the author, when he evaluates a company, he looks for innovations that create something that makes a process significantly cheaper, faster or more scalable. When that happens, adoption often accelerates quickly because the economics suddenly make sense for everyone in the business.

Why these signals matter to investors.  Many venture investors build large portfolios and hope that one or two companies become huge winners. The author’s philosophy is slightly different. He prefers concentration.  If you want to outperform your competitors in this sector, be ready for high-conviction selection over sheer volume. His focus is always on identifying companies that bypass incremental gains to drive fundamental structural disruption. Because when proprietary technology is paired with a radical shift in economics, we uncover a rare synergy that can translate into massive, scalable growth.

Therefore, do not focus only on building a good company. Focus on building a company that changes how an industry operates. Because investors are not blind when a business proves they can truly change the rules of the game.