What does 'you become what you disrupt' mean?

“You become what you disrupt” is a principle Jesse Robbins first articulated on O’Reilly Radar in 2007, exploring what happens when disruptive technologies win: they take on the obligations of the systems they replaced. He used Skype and VoIP as the original example — services that started as scrappy alternatives to the phone system, then faced the same 911 requirements, regulatory burdens, and public-utility expectations as the incumbents they’d disrupted.

The pattern repeats across every generation of technology. Chef disrupted manual infrastructure management with open-source automation. Over time, Chef itself became the established platform that a new generation of tools — containers, Kubernetes, serverless — would disrupt. The same happened with the DevOps movement: practices that were radical in 2008 became corporate orthodoxy by 2018.

For Robbins, the principle is not cynical — it is diagnostic. As an investor, it shapes how he evaluates both startups and markets. Every incumbent was once a disruptor. Every disruptor is on its way to becoming an incumbent. The founders who understand this — who build with the awareness that their own disruption is inevitable — tend to make better long-term decisions about architecture, community, and openness.