Welcome to the holiday edition of our Play Bigger newsletter, a great place to start if you’re asking Santa for 76% of yourcategory’s market cap
Today we’re talking:
1. Category Kings of the North Pole
2. Ray and the gift of the AI Compute engine
3. Five resolutions every company should make for 2025
1. Why Santa is a Great Category Designer
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Except is it really? It’s cold, dark, wintery-mixy and more or less horrible for most of the globe. December is pretty unwonderful when you think about it - but really, what can you do? You can’t change the weather. You can’t time travel. You can’t solve the problem.
Or can you?
Long before Christmas, Hanukkah, or Festivus, humans just accepted the grim truth, that the sun was dying and would probably never return. Nothing to look forward to but cold weather, barren fields and a season of scarcity.
Except, what if we could solve that problem? With a festival! After the harvest when food was plentiful!
That’s exactly what early pagan traditions did - created joyful celebrations that enabled people to look forward to a time that by all rites, they should dread. And while there have been many incarnations of mid-winter holidays fromSaturnalia in ancient Rometo everyone’s favorite, the InternationalEelpout Festivaltoday, they have all existed in a more or less continuous tradition of category creation, helping people overcome winter dreariness with holiday cheer! Solving a massive problem, with a highly effective solution.
No matter what you believe, there is truth to the category genius that is the winter holiday.
2. Anyscale’s Gift of The AI Compute Engine
Sugar plums are great and all, but for those of us with dreams of completing AI dev projects dancing in our heads, there’s a massive problem: the sheer complexity and level of compute power needed to pull these projects off.
Which means many will never see the light of day. Dying before they can even make it to beta.
But, on the other side of this AI complexity wall is a level of upside that would make even the highest flying reindeer blush.
So what do you do? Allow us to introduce you to the world’s first AI Compute Engine, Ray.
Here’s how Anyscale Co-Founder, Ion Stoica, described it at the Ray 2024 Summit, “(we’ve created) a new unifying layer that sits between the bare metal and exploding AI ecosystem” that ends complexity of infrastructure standing in the way of AI progress.
Anyscale Co-founder, Robert Nishihara, went on to walk through the detailed blueprint for the AI Compute Engine and showcased what early adopters have already achieved using the solution, including an astounding…
4x increase in speed for batch inference achieved by Pinterest
5x cheaper batch workloads achieved by Instacart
82% cost reduction, saving Amazon $120M a year by migrating a workload from Spark to Ray
At this year’s company Secret Santa, why not one-up your 12-pack-of-peppermint-bath-bomb-giving colleagues with a gift that will help recipients understand how the bath bomb categorygrew from $0 to $2B in no time flat.
3. Five Resolutions for Category Designers
Forget about losing weight or assuming good intent, here’s a list of actually achievable resolutions anyone can adopt to supercharge their category:
Stop Talking About The Solution: Everyone’s got a solution, but this New Year’s you're going to stop thinking about how great your tech is and instead start framing things in the previously unsolvable problem that tech will conquer!
Think Laterally and Find Non Obvious Problems to Solve: Say it with us: problems that have already been solved ARE NOT PROBLEMS ANYMORE! Finding new ones is harder than you think; you have to challenge basic assumptions that things are the way that they are and cannot be changed.
Build Ecosystems, Not Products: The best product doesn’t win if it’s not part of a clear solution to solve a clear problem - Segway was the best two wheeled thing you could stand on to get to places, but, you know, what problem does it actually solve?
Drain Motes, Make New Friends, But Still Dominate: There’s no such thing as a category of one, so don’t try to trademark your category or blueprint. Make rules anyone can follow, but that you’re best positioned to dominate. Let competitors in to validate and grow the category, it’s over all value, and your dominant share of it all.
Create a Vision For The Future:Think beyond the New Year and into the next two or three - what will the world look like after your category solves that unsolvable problem, and how will lives be different. Tell that story instead of the one about all those awesome features and benefits people might like.
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We’re taking an early holiday break from the podcast but we’ll be back in January, so if you’re one of the loyal listeners, have no fear we’ll be batting around category banter again in no time flat :). If you’re not a listener, then come on, give us a try, it’s like a less effortful version of the Play Bigger newsletter you know and love! We’re expecting a big turnout from you next month!
Santa is the king of a $1.3 trillion dollar holiday gift-giving category because he helps us solve a massive problem. Sure he’s got awesome tech: flying reindeer, a sleigh that goes6 million miles per hour, a festive sack that can hold 1.4 billion cubic liters of toys, and a metabolism capable of taking down 71.2 billion calories in asingle night, but that’s not what makes the holiday season one of the biggest categories of all time. Holiday cheer solves seasonal affective disorder en masse, and enables all of us to look forward to a future that might be a little brighter - even when it’s getting darker outside. Solving a problem with a vision for the future, that’s what keeps Santa on top!
So happy holidays from everyone at Play Bigger! We’ll see you again next year :)
