I worked with Steve Jobs at Apple, where every OS update killed startups. AI founders are about to face the same thing |
I worked with Steve Jobs at Apple, where every OS update killed startups. AI founders are about to face the same thing
Matt Rogers is the co-founder and CEO of Mill, a food waste prevention company based in San Bruno, CA. He is a founder of Incite.org, investing in early-stage companies built to scale. Matt co-founded Nest, acquired by Google in 2014 for $3.2 billion. Prior to Nest, he worked with Steve Jobs to build the original iPhone and other consumer hardware in the 2000s.
Apple famously rendered scores of startups and third-party tools obsolete with nearly every OS update since the mid-2000s. “Sherlocking” regularly kicked promising companies to the curb by effectively erasing their reason to exist — in many cases, by delivering nearly identical features and functionality.
I saw it firsthand when I worked on the iPhone, iPod, and iPad under Steve Jobs. Every product launch and OS upgrade generated excitement for users and existential fear for founders. Founding teams spent years building capabilities that Apple could absorb into the operating system overnight. Life’s work became dead on arrival.
Sherlocked, but Not Forgotten
There are several companies that folded worth mentioning, but here are three that stand out to me:
Tile kept pace with AirTag for a while because even though Apple made a slightly nicer tracker, Tile had years of market leadership, retail distribution, meaningful hardware revenue, and a defensible head start. But the balance did eventually tip toward Apple when they launched AirTag with deep integration into the Find My network and the U1 chip. Suddenly, Tile no longer had access to the same system-level advantages. It lost access to the oxygen that mattered: defaults, permissions, hardware integration, and distribution. The company was eventually acquired by Life360 in 2021 for approximately $205 million — a fraction of its peak valuation.
Pebble invented the modern smartwatch category years before the Apple Watch hit shelves. The company built a passionate developer ecosystem........