What does 'you become what you disrupt' mean?

"You become what you disrupt" is a principle Jesse Robbins coined to describe how disruptors inevitably take on the obligations of the systems they replaced. It shapes how he evaluates startups and markets as an investor.

You Become What You Disrupt: Jesse Robbins on the Cycle of Disruption

You become what you disrupt.

I first wrote about this on O’Reilly Radar in 2007, exploring what happens when disruptive technologies win. They take on the obligations of the systems they replaced. Skype and VoIP started as scrappy alternatives to the phone system. Then they faced the same 911 requirements, regulatory burdens, and public-utility expectations as the incumbents they had disrupted. The question I asked then still holds: what changes when you go from disruptive technology to public utility?

The pattern repeats. 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 DevOps movement followed the same arc. Practices that were radical in 2008 became corporate orthodoxy by 2018.

None of us want to be that shitty enterprise organization we created products to replace. If you are successful, that is your future. You get to make it suck less. You have to deal with it no matter what.

Every incumbent was once a disruptor. Every disruptor is on its way to becoming an incumbent. The founders who understand this, who build knowing their own disruption is inevitable, tend to make better long-term decisions about architecture, community, and openness.

Further reading