Al Ramadan

The founders of a respected Silicon Valley advisory firm study legendary category-creating companies and reveal a groundbreaking discipline called category design.
Winning today isn’t about beating the competition at the old game. It’s about inventing a whole new game—defining a new market category, developing it, and dominating it over time. You can’t build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you’re… Show more

The founders of a respected Silicon Valley advisory firm study legendary category-creating companies and reveal a groundbreaking discipline called category design.
Winning today isn’t about beating the competition at the old game. It’s about inventing a whole new game—defining a new market category, developing it, and dominating it over time. You can’t build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you’re going to lose.
In this farsighted, pioneering guide, the founders of Silicon Valley advisory firm Play Bigger rely on data analysis and interviews to understand the inner workings of “category kings”— companies such as Amazon, Salesforce, Uber, and IKEA—that give us new ways of living, thinking or doing business, often solving problems we didn’t know we had.
In Play Bigger, the authors assemble their findings to introduce the new discipline of category design. By applying category design, companies can create new demand where none existed, conditioning customers’ brains so they change their expectations and buying habits. While this discipline defines the tech industry, it applies to every kind of industry and even to personal careers.
Crossing the Chasm revolutionized how we think about new products in an existing market. The Innovator’s Dilemma taught us about disrupting an aging market. Now, Play Bigger is transforming business once again, showing us how to create the market itself. Show less

The Harvard Business Review just published an article based on Play Bigger data science research into how technology companies are producing enduring value. Our Play Bigger data science team conducted a multi-year march to analyze all of the investment and market cap data from venture-backed companies funded since the turn of the century. Our team interrogated the data until it revealed the truth about a number of key factors:

-How fast companies produce market cap
-When companies… Show more

The Harvard Business Review just published an article based on Play Bigger data science research into how technology companies are producing enduring value. Our Play Bigger data science team conducted a multi-year march to analyze all of the investment and market cap data from venture-backed companies funded since the turn of the century. Our team interrogated the data until it revealed the truth about a number of key factors:

-How fast companies produce market cap
-When companies produce enduring value Show less

When a company builds and dominates a big new market, customers want it to succeed and will rally behind it even when it screws up.

Uber’s genius is that it created ubering. The 5-year-oldcompany just got valued at $17 billion based on its last round of funding. Only one other start-up, Facebook, has hit that valuation this early. Uber is worth it because it has developed its own market category – ubering – and is proving it can dominate a new transportation sector in city after city.

The electric carmaker has been in danger of becoming a pioneering company in a small niche of the automobile market. Tesla is inviting competition and doing what startups from Salesforce.com to GoPro to Uber have done: It’s building a new whole new market sector in an effort to dominate it over time.

As the company looks to go public, it should capitalize on the potential that it could one day be a sports company.

Narcissistic CEOs often under perform their peers and are more likely to be convicted of fraud, according to a study

What savvy tech investors look for. Our new blog unveils #SiliconValley investing secret http://ow.ly/vyOop .@FortuneMagazine

New social, mobile, and cloud technologies are giving both consumers and marketers more power than ever. Today when we have an interest in a product or service we do most of our research, browsing, and buying digitally.