Welcome to the Pirate Street Journal, the category news the business press misses.
Each week, we pick three headlines and break down the category underneath. Live every Thursday at 7 am PST / 10 am EST. See the news through a different lens. Keep reading in the Deep Dive Reports.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Walk into any meeting this week, and you’ll hear a room full of headline parrots, everyone repeating the same stories they read that morning.
Thirty minutes with us every Thursday makes you the smartest person in the room every Friday.
Most smart people in that meeting are invisible experts. They know their field cold, but they read the same headlines as everyone else, so they say the same thing as everyone else. The reason is that they’re category blind: they watch the companies and miss the category those companies are playing in. Pirate Street Journal trains your eye to see it every week, so you walk in as the visible expert in the room.
Three topics, ten minutes each, and you’re done. Give us 30 minutes on Thursday, and you’ll be the smartest person in the room by Friday.
Watch this week’s episode on the Category Pirates YouTube:
▶️ Category Pirates is on a mission to unleash 100,000 category designers into the world. To do that, we’ve been building our YouTube channel, so as the donkey’s say, don’t forget to like and subscribe so we can reach more invisible experts destined to become Category Designers.
Here’s what we covered in this episode:
1. Why is Wall Street judging all of AI by two companies?
Wall Street is worried AI is a bubble.
The two biggest AI companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, will make about $200 billion this year. Meanwhile, the world could be spending $3 trillion to $4 trillion a year building AI by 2030. That’s at least 15 times more.
Everyone’s wondering: can those two companies ever make enough money to pay for all of it?
Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder of Nvidia, the company that makes the chips AI runs on, says that’s the wrong question. In the latest BG2 podcast, Jensen splits Nvidia’s business into three rough slices:
Classical science and safety work, like physics, chemistry, and catching credit card fraud. No chatbots needed, and this slice is growing 30% to 40% a year.
The big AI companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Thousands of small startups that rent Nvidia’s chips to build their own products.
Only one of those three slices depends on the big AI companies.
Watching two companies and missing everything around them is what being category blind looks like.
Remember AOL?
In the 1990s, AOL was the internet for millions of families. Then AOL faded, and the internet ended up in everything. Some AI companies may crash too. That tells you about those companies. It tells you nothing about AI.
The category move: the ABS law. When a technology really works, it disappears into everyday things, and people stop asking whether it’s a bubble. Anti-lock brakes keep your car from skidding when you slam on the brakes. Nobody asks if brakes are overhyped. They’re just part of the car.
You’ve probably used AI today without noticing. Your bank’s text asking “did you make this purchase?”, the map that routed you around traffic, and the photo app that found every picture of your dog all run on it. That’s the ABS law happening in your own pocket.
So what does this mean for you?
You can’t control whether AI stocks go up or down. You can control whether AI shows up in your business before it shows up in your competitor’s.
Our Deep Dive Reports go further, into how AI can save you $10,000 in 10 minutes in your own life.
Here’s the one thing to understand to be the visible expert in your next meeting:
Everyone’s worried about two AI companies, but that’s like judging the internet by AOL. Some AI companies may crash. AI itself is going into everything, and most of Nvidia’s business already comes from outside those two companies.
2. People paid $250,000 for the Roadster in 2017. Why did they get a stunt instead of a car?
Tesla just showed off the craziest car it has ever made.
At a SpaceX test site in Texas, the new Roadster went from 0 to 60 in about one second. It drove upside down on a ramp, flipped in midair, and used small rocket thrusters to jump over five other Teslas.
Then Elon Musk said it’s the last Tesla built for a human to drive. After this, it’s robots.
But Tesla first promised this car for 2020. People paid $50,000 to $250,000 to reserve one back in 2017. The new date is 2028, and there’s still no price.
Why would Tesla build a wild car almost nobody will get, and then say it’s done making cars for people to drive?
Well, the show had three audiences, and only one of them was car buyers:
Investors, who are watching Musk talk about bringing Tesla and SpaceX closer together. A car built by both companies is a pretty loud way to make that case.
Engineers, who Tesla wants to hire. Nothing says “come build the future with us” like a flying car.
Regular car shoppers, who will never buy this car but might buy a regular Tesla because of it.
Judging the Roadster as a car is what being category blind looks like.
To be the visible expert in the room, let’s look at Acura.
In the early 1990s, Acura built a race car that few people ever bought. It didn’t need to sell. It made the whole brand look cool, so people walked into Acura dealers and drove home in regular four-door sedans.
Here’s the category move to study: the Lightning Strike. A Lightning Strike is a marketing event so big that people can’t stop talking about your category. The two most reliable kinds are a stunt or a fight, and a car jumping five cars is about as stunt as it gets.
There’s a bonus, too.
The suction system that held the Roadster upside down could someday help a regular car keep from spinning out on black ice. Fancy tech starts expensive, gets cheaper, and ends up in everyone’s car, just like anti-lock brakes did.
So what does this mean for you?
If you ever pitch investors, a board, or your boss, notice what Tesla actually sold that night. People pay for the size of the future you can make them see.
The Lightning Strike Playbook goes further, into how to plan your own Lightning Strike for $10,000, $100,000 or $1 million.
Here’s the one thing to understand to be the visible expert in your next meeting:
Everyone’s rolling their eyes at why Tesla built a car almost nobody will get. The real audience was investors and engineers, and it works the way Acura’s race car helped sell regular sedans. The car is the ad for Tesla cars that the business news misses.
3. If AI can copy Photoshop for free, why would anyone keep paying Adobe?
Business news is worried AI just broke Adobe.
In October, an engineer in Atlanta got tired of Adobe charging him a fee to cancel. So he used Claude to rebuild seven Adobe apps, including Photoshop, and gave them away for free. Then he did the same with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
The free copies are rough. The Photoshop copy does maybe 45% of what a professional needs, but it’s fully customizable because it’s built on open source. One big bank told investors to stop buying Adobe stock, and the stock is down about 30% this year.
The strange part is that Adobe just had the best quarter in its history: $6.76 billion in sales, up 13%.
But if AI can copy Photoshop for free, why would anyone keep paying for it?
And how will that affect current law?
When a business pays for Adobe, it’s buying three things:
The software itself.
Future updates, so the tools keep getting better.
Support, meaning someone to call when something breaks on deadline.
Only one of those three is the software, and that’s the only one the free copy gives you.
Treating Adobe like it only sells software is what being category blind looks like.
Remember when bottled water first showed up?
Water comes out of your kitchen tap for almost nothing. People still buy billions of dollars of bottled water every year, because they’re paying for something the tap doesn’t give them: it’s cold, it’s handy, and they trust it. Free doesn’t win just because it’s free.
However.
Back in 2023, Adobe launched Generative Fill, an AI tool that blew people away. Since then, Adobe has gone quiet. This is Category Neglect. If you stop moving your category forward, someone else will move it for you.
You’ve probably kept paying for an app you barely use because canceling felt like a hassle, or you needed one specific feature. That hassle is money a company collects without earning it, and that one feature can now be vibe coded. Adobe agreed this year to pay $150 million to settle a government case over how hard it made canceling.
When customers stay because leaving is hard, that’s an early warning sign.
So what does this mean for you?
Open source means the code is free and anyone is allowed to change it.
Most of us use only a small slice of the software we pay for.
If you sell software, your customers can now build their own version of you. Your only defense is to keep innovating. Stop doing that, and you’ve fallen into category neglect.
Here’s the one thing to understand to be the visible expert in your next meeting:
Big companies will keep paying Adobe for updates, support, and someone to call. Small businesses might not. With free open-source software and AI, they can build a tool that does exactly what they need and nothing extra. That’s a threat to Adobe and a big opportunity for everyone else.
Most pirates don’t know PSJ is on YouTube. If this was useful, please subscribe to the channel, like the episode, and send it to one person who wants to be the smartest person in the room every Friday.
The parrots vs. the category
The headline parrots spent this week asking three company questions: is OpenAI a bubble, is Tesla quitting cars, and is Adobe finished?
Every real answer was sitting in the category, not the company. AI is spreading into everything, Tesla is selling the size of the robot category, and Adobe’s value is moving from the app to the layer around it.
Every company rises or falls with its category. Spotting that before the rest of the room is what makes you the visible expert.
Now see your own category
Every week, PSJ trains your eye on other people’s categories. That’s how you stop being category blind about the news and become the visible expert in the room. The harder part is seeing your own.
It’s much easier to spot what Adobe missed than what you’re missing. That’s where most invisible experts get lost at sea: they know their sea cold and still can’t see the category they’re playing in.
Becoming a Founding member gives you all the resources to stop being the invisible expert in the room and become the visible expert. You can jam 24/7 with the Pirate Eddie and Pirate Christopher Bot, read all 7 of our big books, join the founding community, and join our live monthly jam sessions where you can ask any category design question.
Come aboard the pirate ship and stop being category blind here.
Read next from the vault
The Magic Triangle: Why Category Design Is The Single Point Of Failure lays out the three corners every winning company needs: product, company and category. It explains why a free clone of Adobe’s product still leaves two corners standing, and what happens to the incumbent that stops tending the third. 🏴☠️
Recorded Monday, October 26, 2026. Every number above is as of that morning.
Piratey disclaimer: This is NOT financial advice. None of us have a Series 63, Series 7, Series 6, CPAs, CFAs, IUDs, IEDs, and hopefully not IBS (this makes DUDE Wipes sad).
Arrrrrrr,
Category Pirates 🏴☠️
Eddie Yoon
Christopher Lochhead
Bri Clark