Series
Product Stories
A two-part pair on discovery done right and wrong — Segment and Superhuman's evidence-driven pivots, set against Quibi, Juicero, and Humane's false validation, closing with Klarna and Duolingo's AI-first reversals — told from the record rather than the legend.
2 parts · first published
- 01
Watch What They Do: Segment, Superhuman, and Discovery That Worked
Segment's founders built a classroom tool that professors loved — until Peter Reinhardt watched students open Facebook the moment lectures got boring, and offered all eight investors their money back. Superhuman's Rahul Vohra took the opposite route: he turned the fuzzy question 'do people want this?' into a single segmentable number and moved it from 22% to 58% in a year. Two very different shapes of discovery, one shared principle: behavior, not opinion, is the input to strategy.
·9 min read - 02
Cut Too Deep: Klarna, Duolingo, and the Cost of Borrowed Conviction
In February 2024, Klarna announced its AI assistant was doing the work of 700 agents; fifteen months later its CEO told Bloomberg they'd 'cut too deep.' A year after that, Duolingo put AI usage into performance reviews, watched its most loyal users revolt, and quietly took it back out. Neither company was wrong about AI. Both were wrong about what their own principles required — and the distance between those two mistakes is where this whole series has been heading.
·10 min read