✍️ Essay
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Why we picked it Benedict Evans is one of the sharpest people at separating a real structural shift from noise, and this essay lays out his instinct in the open. His core line, that there is a huge gap between an amazing demo and something a big complicated company can actually use, is a practical filter for any market that looks like it is about to explode. Treat it as a way of thinking, not a call on any one wave.
AI and the automation of work
From ben-evans.com by Benedict Evans ~20 min read
- A great demo is not a market: real shifts survive the slow grind of integration, trust, and switching costs, and that grind is where fads die.
- Look at whether a technology follows the long pattern of past automation (old jobs go, new ones appear) rather than promising a clean overnight break, which is usually the hype tell.
- Adoption runs on the buyer's clock, not the startup's 18-month funding clock, so early flatness can mean too early rather than wrong, a distinction worth being honest about.