The Pattern
In 1993, AT&T ran a commercial predicting the future. Video calls. GPS navigation. Movies on demand. A phone on your wrist. Directed by David Fincher, narrated by Tom Selleck. Every prediction came true. Every single one was built by someone else. Each ad ended with: “And the company that will bring it to you… AT&T.” They had Bell Labs—the institution that invented the transistor, Unix, and the laser. They saw the future clearly enough to buy a Super Bowl ad about it. Then they spent the next 30 years trying to be a media company and settled for being a utility.
The pattern never changes.
In 1994, Sears cancelled their catalog—the original “everything store.” They had the warehouses, the logistics, the customer base. Two years later, Amazon launched from a garage. Sears had the playbook. They let it slip away.
Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975. Their competitor Fujifilm faced the same crisis—digital was killing film. Fujifilm looked at the chemistry underneath and pivoted into semiconductor materials. Today they supply nearly half the world’s chip-polishing compounds. Kodak filed for bankruptcy.
Blockbuster had 9,000 stores and every customer Netflix wanted. They passed on buying Netflix for $50 million. Yellow Pages had the directory—every business, every phone number. Google built a better one and made it free.
The technology was never the problem. The identity crisis was.
I’ve spent 20 years watching this play out. The incumbents get comfortable. The founders get hungry. Power shifts.
I cut my teeth in telecom—six companies, multiple turnarounds. Cbeyond, Birch, Xspedius, Airband, Alpheus, Windstream. Chaos was the job. At Cbeyond, I was their #1 rep nationally and watched us go from scrappy startup to IPO.
Then I went to Amazon. Not to coast—to learn. I wanted to see how Big Tech actually operates from the inside. Grew my org from $1B to $3.2B. Built AI-powered systems. Pushed hard. Shipped fast.
And I confirmed what I suspected: They’re stuck.
I love the people at Amazon. Brilliant, hardworking, good humans. But the machine is slowing down. Apple without Jobs. Amazon without Bezos. Big Tech struggles to innovate without founders at the helm. The same vulnerability they exploited in the 2000s? They have it now.
AI is the new catalog. The new film chemistry. The new “You Will” commercial. The founders who grab it will be the next Amazon. The companies that committee-meeting their way through this window will be the next Sears, the next Kodak, the next AT&T—brilliant people who saw the future and still couldn’t build it.
I’m not just writing about this pattern. I’m building the weapon.
