Geoffrey Moore - Building Gorilla Businesses

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (2:09)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:34)
My guest today is the renowned tech author, consultant and venture partner at Wildcat Ventures, Geoffrey Moore. Geoffrey has spent his career focused on the dynamics surrounding disruptive innovations and his book Crossing the Chasm has become a canonical work for young businesses trying to unlock mainstream markets.
This discussion is a master class on business strategy. We start with Geoffrey's more recent work on category defining businesses, break down his life cycle of adoption framework and close with the ways messaging should change as companies evolve. Please enjoy this great discussion with Geoffrey Moore.
So Geoffrey, your books were some of my earliest education in the world of the competitive landscape of technology. And I'd actually like to start at the end in terms of how I think about your work, which is with the concept of a guerrilla as a business. Everyone's gonna know Crossing the Chasm. We're gonna talk a lot about all the insight from that book and that thinking. But I think the guerrilla as a concept is for me, a great unifying theme of your work. Aspirationally, we all are gonna wanna be guerrillas or invest in guerrillas or start guerrillas at some point. So maybe just begin there. What do you mean by a guerrilla company? Define that for us to begin.

**Geoffrey Moore** (3:42)
The simplest definition is a market share leader in a powerful category.
In order to sort of take that model apart, we created something called the hierarchy of powers. And the idea behind the hierarchy of powers was, go back to investing. If you want to invest in a successful company, you want to invest in one that has more competitive advantage than the alternative investments.
How would you actually analyze competitive advantage? And that led us to something called the hierarchy of powers. This is the core investment model behind the guerrilla game and living on the fault line and going forward. So the hierarchy of powers says the most powerful power is what we call the category power. It has to do with the technology adoption life cycle and where is the category that this company specializes in monetizing? Where is it in its adoption life cycle?
And for most businesses, most of the time, it's on what we call mainstream. In other words, the category has been established for a decade or more.