In 2019, I had my best idea. Now, in 2025, after countless pitch meetings, I've come to a fundamental realization about venture capital and innovation that I wish I'd known then —
there is an ocean of difference between disruption and transformation:
— disruption is preserving something you understand.
— transformation is creating something new you may not fully understand.
Most people believe disruption is change. It is not. It is an act of preservation. You are updating a thing from the past to keep it relevant in the present.
In order to disrupt the status quo, there has to be a status quo.
Transformation requires stepping into the future — traveling forward in time to a place only you can see and taking up residence there. You will spend years living in that future, mostly alone, working endlessly. For you, the future will have become the present, but you continue to look forward, building the future you first saw.
And very slowly, something funny will start to happen — so slowly, you won’t even notice it — you will begin to transform the past.
The present will itself transform into a roadmap — a straight path into a now near-certain future, one that points directly toward an asymmetrical return.
Then one day, just as the world is about to catch up to you, you will realize that the past suddenly looks like your present — and you finally understand the true nature of change.
Every entrepreneur will inevitably question his or her own role in this process: from investor behavior to founder psychology to market outcomes. And while no one person's roadmap can ever serve as another's guide, you can always leave a signpost along the way.
The venture capital industry has built various frameworks for evaluating disruption: TAM analysis, competition matrices, and unit economics. These tools work perfectly for measuring known markets. They fail entirely for transformative opportunities.
This creates a paradox: VCs claim to seek transformative opportunities while using tools that systematically filter them out. They actively avoid what they don't understand, and yet transformative ideas are, by definition, not fully understandable at inception.
Transformation often reveals itself through unexpected patterns:
- It disrupts multiple markets as a side effect, without additional effort.
- It's always "too early" — until suddenly it's not.
- The challenge isn't product-market fit (impossible to measure for a market that doesn't exist) but investor-market fit.
- Blindly following canned disruptive startup advice ("move fast and break things," "launch quickly," "fail fast") is highly counterproductive at best.
For entrepreneurs pursuing transformative ideas, the greatest challenge isn't technical or even market-related — it's psychological. You'll spend years being told you're wrong by some very smart people, who simply can't imagine the world as you do, to see the future you see. They'll tell you to pivot, pack it up and move on, to focus on smaller opportunities, to follow proven playbooks — to stop wasting your time.
What they won't tell you — what they can't tell you — is that their frameworks are built for a different kind of company, in a different market, at a different time. You will fail to change their minds. They will be utterly convinced of their monopoly on the truth — precisely because they are fixated on the past — something familiar. It is something they believe they fully understand.
They are measuring disruption, while you are building transformation.
Blackberry disrupted mobile communication. They understood their goal: perfect email and messaging on phones. Investors understood it too. The metrics were clear, the market known, the execution path visible. Result: $80B peak valuation.
Apple transformed computing through the iPhone. They created possibilities they couldn't fully envision. Most investors and analysts dismissed it — "just a phone with an iPod." They couldn't see it because you can't measure the market for something that doesn't yet exist. Result: $3T market cap from a market that didn't previously exist.
Walmart.com disrupted retail by moving it online. Clear objective, known market, measurable metrics. Investors could model it.
Amazon transformed commerce. They didn't just disrupt retail — as a side effect of their transformation, they disrupted enterprise IT, created cloud computing, and revolutionized logistics. Nobody, including Amazon, fully understood these possibilities at the start. They couldn't have. These markets didn't exist.
Expedia ($76B market cap) disrupted travel agencies by digitizing their model. Clear path, known market, understood behaviors.
Airbnb ($150B+ market cap) transformed our relationship with space and trust. Early investors passed because "strangers won't stay in other strangers' homes." They were evaluating a transformative idea through a disruptive lens — measuring it against known behaviors rather than seeing its potential to create new ones.
Blockbuster disrupted video rental — making an existing model more convenient. Investors could understand the unit economics, market size, and competitive dynamics.
Netflix transformed entertainment. Not by choice, but by necessity — streaming created new content consumption patterns that weren't previously possible. The market didn't exist for "binge watching" or data-driven content creation. You couldn't measure product-market fit for behaviors that didn't yet exist.
Understanding this change leads to a fundamentally different evaluation approach:
1. Market Assessment
- Disruptive: Size of existing market
- Transformative: Scope of new market
2. Risk Profile
- Disruptive: Execution risk within known parameters
- Transformative: Uncertain risk with unprecedented upside
3. Timeline
- Disruptive: Clear path to market and revenue
- Transformative: Longer path to realize full potential
4. Success Metrics
- Disruptive: Market share gains
- Transformative: New behavioral defaults
As we enter an era of accelerating technological change — with AI, synthetic biology, and quantum computing emerging — this distinction becomes more important — and the ability to tell the difference, even more crucial. These technologies won't just change existing systems. They'll create entirely new possibilities we can’t yet fully understand.
The most successful investors won’t be those who best understand how to combine existing technologies with existing markets to preserve the past.
It will, instead, be those who can recognize a transformative opportunity even when — especially when — they don’t fully understand it. But who, once they see it, cannot unsee it.
For investors: The question isn't whether you understand it. The question is whether you're willing to back exceptional entrepreneurs creating something completely new that you won’t — and shouldn’t expect to — fully understand (yet). Your job isn’t just to ask what can go wrong. Your job is to ask yourself, what if this goes right?
The answer separates billion-dollar outcomes from trillion-dollar transformations.
For entrepreneurs: Your job isn't to retrofit transformative ideas into disruptive frameworks for investors who will never fund what they can’t fully understand anyway. Focus on finding the rare investors who understand this difference. Not the one who wonders “how” they can help, but how they can help you get there even faster.
In 2019, they all said I was too early.
Convinced I was waiting for a future that would never come.
I wasn’t.
Investors were too late.
I was already here in 2025.
— In short, do not quit.