Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

Figure 3. The magic triangle: to improve the odds of becoming a category king, companies should engage in product design, company design, and category design at roughly the same time.

“Increased choice among goods and services may contribute little or nothing to the kind of freedom that counts,” writes Barry Schwartz in Paradox of Choice. “Indeed, it may impair freedom by taking time and energy we’d be better off devoting to other matters.”

Category design involves creating a great product (along with its experience), a great company, and a great category at the same time. It is a broad, deep discipline that impacts every part of a company and its leadership team.

In 2014, consulting giant McKinsey published an article titled “Grow Fast or Die Slow.” McKinsey analyzed three thousand software and online companies from 1980 to 2012. It identified a small slice of remarkable companies as “Supergrowers,” which pretty much overlaps with our definition of category kings, and proclaimed that wildly fast out-of-the-

Bryan Roberts at Venrock, another top-tier VC, tries to spot potential category kings early.

Elvis Presley, the category king of rock and roll.

Peter Drucker was the category king of management thinking.

Our term for the companies that create, develop, and dominate new categories is category kings.

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