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How to Bet on the Next Category-Defining AI Start-Up
Ann Bordetsky on timing, founder depth, and why “niches make riches”
The companies everyone worships as “category kings”? Most of them were second to the party.
Assume every AI prompt you write ends up in court one day. Your AI chats aren’t just productivity hacks—they’re future subpoenas. If your team is pasting decks, contracts, or customer lists into ChatGPT, that’s not “working smarter.” That’s building an evidence folder in someone else’s system. If that made your stomach drop, good.
And this isn’t hypothetical. One popular router, OpenRouter, saw around 6 trillion tokens in a week. If even 10% of those prompts include PII, that’s hundreds of millions of “oh no” moments quietly landing in logs every seven days.
Jonathan Mortensen & CONFSEC
If you’re still optimizing for “first-mover advantage,” you’re basically volunteering to run the world’s most expensive market research project for whoever actually wins. The real edge is backing the team that shows up after the hype and still makes the category feel like it was built for them.
On this episode of CLIMB, I sat down with Ann Bordetsky, Partner at NEA and operator-turned-investor who’s lived both sides of the table. She helped build Uber and Twitter, was COO at Rival (acquired by Live Nation), and now backs Perplexity, Contra, Fizz, and Glacier. She’s seen category creation from the cockpit and the control tower, and she’s ruthlessly focused on one thing: founders building real AI companies, not shiny demos.
Category Creators Don’t Have to Be First—They Have to Be Inevitable
History keeps running the same play. Spotify wasn’t the first music streamer. Uber wasn’t the first rideshare. Slack wasn’t the first work chat tool. The early players burn time and cash educating the market; the winner shows up when technology shifts collide with behavior shifts, then nails product, business model, and go-to-market in that exact moment.
AI is playing out the same way. OpenAI and ChatGPT did the hard work of teaching the world what’s possible. Now there’s an opening for true category creators, teams like Perplexity turning “search” into an answer engine instead of 10 blue links and a wall of ads.
Ann isn’t looking for vision merchants. She wants founders with imagination (they can describe a weird, specific future) and real depth (they can go 10 questions deep on the problem without hand-waving). That combo is what lets you ride a platform shift and still build something people actually use every day for the next decade.
Key Takeaways
Second movers can win when the market feels inevitable.
The first mover trains the market; the category creator is the one everyone quietly defaults to. In AI, that’s the shift from “I can chat with a model” to “of course I use this answer engine for everything.”
Depth is the cheat code for picking winners.
Ann optimizes for “sustained, nerdy depth”: founders who speak in specifics about customers, data, workflows, and edge cases. If they know where the bodies are buried, they’re more likely to navigate pivots and still end up owning the space.
Behavior change now jumps from insane to obvious overnight.
Last year, wearing a device that records your day sounded dystopian; now people are pre-ordering Limitless-style pendants without blinking. In an AI-shaped world, if you hit the timing right, the gap between “that’s insane” and “why doesn’t everyone do this?” is unbelievably short.
In AI, “niches make riches,” especially for SMBs.
Instead of chasing giant TAM slides, Ann wants to see an AI product that feels like hiring 30 people with one credit card swipe. Start narrow, become indispensable, and let word-of-mouth in that niche quietly turn into a real company.
Raise like you plan to be the default, not just survive.
Don’t spend the whole meeting doing a book report on the last 18 months. Ann wants the inevitability story: how you become the default in your category, why this platform shift makes your timing non-repeatable, and how your distribution advantage compounds over 5–10 years.
If you're trying to figure out which AI startups are actual category creators versus clever features, especially if you’re drowning in AI pitch decks right now, I think this one’s worth an hour of your life.
Definitely watch or listen to the full episode with Ann Bordetsky of NEA here.
