“You can sort of eavesdrop on your competitor and try to get a sense of what they're doing. But how do you eavesdrop on two guys in a garage you've never heard of?”
Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing · October 2026
Cole argues that innovation comes from your competitors but disruption comes from nowhere: retail was upended by a Seattle bookseller, not Walmart, and taxis by software people, not Hertz. His advice is to run your company as if you expect to be disrupted.
Transcript
…this year, you have speakers who foolishly are telling graduates living through the worst job market for graduates in the last 70 years in fear that there are no jobs. They're telling them all, seize the opportunity, learn AI, and it's booing and chic jeering. So this, this is the stakes are big.
It seems as though disruption almost never comes from where an industry or a company is watching. And I wonder, is there a discipline for auditing a company's vulnerability or an industry's vulnerability to these disruptive changes rather than just scanning the horizon?
It's darn tough because as you said, innovation comes likely from your competitor, figures out a better way to do what you do and may gain market share. Disruption comes from completely unexpected places. The disruption of the retail business should have come from Walmart or Target, not an upstart bookseller in Seattle. And the disruption of the taxi business, my God, was anything more ripe for disruption than taxis and are just should have come from Yellow Cab or Hertz or Avis, not a bunch of computer nerds in the Silicon Valley who knew nothing about transportation, but knew a lot about algorithms to make things happen. And the disruption of the automobile business should have come from Toyota or General Motors, not from a South immigrant, South African immigrant who didn't know much about transportation. So it does come from all these unexpected places. We use it in the subtitle of the book, but everybody knows this as two guys in a variage.…
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