But to again invoke poker champion Greg Raymer, the odds are the same for everyone in the game. The key is to play bigger by doing everything in your power to increase your odds. It won’t guarantee winning, but it gives you a better chance than others around you—and certainly a better chance than hoping to get struck by lightning. Category design

Okay, but Hold On—What the Hell Is Category Design? Category design is the discipline of creating and developing a new market category, and conditioning the market so it will demand your solution and crown your company as its king.

Gestated at Stanford University and birthed at IDEO, it became known as product design, meshing the art of design with engineering. By applying that discipline, IDEO designed the first mouse for a commercial PC and the first commercial laptop. Product design is a given in technology today—no company would not do it. “We used to think product design

(As Henry Ford famously-supposedly said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”) You feel the absence of category design when you hire McKinsey to do another study that will cost a gazillion fucking dollars or when investment bankers pitch acquisitions that make as much sense as adding chocolate syrup to beer.

Before Google, all sorts of search engines proliferated: Alta Vista, Lycos, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves, AllTheWeb, and more. They seemed awesome at the time because nothing like a search engine had ever existed. But none of those search engines made real money—the only way they could monetize search was through banner ads, which never worked well for

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