The Philippines is carving out a distinctive path in Southeast Asia’s economic development by prioritising infrastructure reliability as a core productivity driver.

The “Philippine Private Capital Report 2026” by Foxmont Capital Partners highlights a key insight: while headline-grabbing mega-projects draw attention, it is the everyday dependability of utilities and services (power, water, internet, ports, and transport) that consistently unlocks firm-level productivity gains. That lesson is immediately relevant not only inside the Philippines but across fast-growing economies in Southeast Asia.

Reliability: the hidden productivity factor for firms

For many Philippine small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the cost of unreliable infrastructure is a day-to-day reality. Frequent power interruptions, variable water pressure, and intermittent internet connectivity lead firms to “self-insure.”

Also Read: From agritech to AI ops: 15 startups driving Philippines’s innovation shift (Part 2)

Common responses include buying backup gensets (diesel generators), installing water storage and purification systems, and subscribing to multiple internet providers or deploying satellite/4G/5G failovers. These risk-mitigation costs are real and persistent: they reduce available cash flow for investment in productivity-enhancing technologies, staff training, or capacity expansion.

This dynamic plays out across the archipelago in ways that district-level statistics can obscure. In Metro Manila, rolling brownouts and overloaded distribution transformers are a drag on manufacturing and business process outsourcing (BPO) firms that require continuous operations.

In secondary cities—like Cebu, Davao, and Iloilo—infrastructure reliability can be the difference between attracting an export-oriented factory or losing a contract to a more predictable location in Vietnam or Thailand.

For agricultural processors in Mindanao, irregular electricity and logistics delays increase post-harvest losses and reduce competitiveness.

The takeaway is that policymakers should measure more than installed capacity or kilometres of new roads. Operational metrics—uptime, variance, frequency of service interruptions, repair response times—are the practical measurements that determine whether infrastructure actually supports business.

Regional value chain integration depends on predictability

Reliability matters not just for domestic operations but for the Philippines’s ability to link into regional value chains. ASEAN economies are competing to attract deeper segments of electronics, automotive, and high-value manufacturing supply chains. These sectors require predictable inputs, just-in-time delivery and stable utilities. A factory that must maintain its own generators to meet contract uptime clauses faces higher operating costs and lower margins than one located where the grid is consistently reliable.

The Philippines has a comparative advantage in skilled labour and an English-speaking workforce, making it attractive for higher-value services and certain light manufacturing. But to capture a larger share of electronics or automotive component manufacturing relocating from China, reliability gaps must be closed.

Southeast Asian neighbours such as Vietnam and Malaysia have made notable progress in grid stability and logistics efficiency in recent years; the Philippines’ unique geography—an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands—raises the bar for integrated solutions that combine national grid upgrades with localised microgrids, improved port handling and seamless digital logistics.

Policy progress—and persistent, localised challenges

There are encouraging developments. Administrative digitalisation—examples such as digital company registration via eSPARC—has lowered fixed costs and simplified formalisation for businesses, demonstrating how procedural digitisation can complement physical infrastructure reliability.

Also Read: Why 2025 is a milestone year for startup funding in the Philippines

Similarly, regulatory changes to telecommunications foreign ownership rules have been aimed at fostering competition, attracting more capital, and improving service quality. When combined with incentives for private investment through public-private partnerships (PPPs), these reforms can magnify the impact of physical infrastructure upgrades.

However, challenges remain. Geographical disparities in service quality are stark: urban centres may enjoy multiple fibre routes and near-continuous power, while remote islands rely on ageing diesel plants and maritime supply chains vulnerable to weather. Local government units (LGUs) display uneven digital adoption: some provinces streamline permits and provide online business services, while others still depend on paper-based processes that delay firm expansion.

Addressing these localised disparities requires a two-pronged strategy: strengthen national standards and oversight for reliability metrics, while investing in targeted local capacity building—training municipal engineers, digitising municipal services, and co-financing microgrid or fibre projects in underserved areas.

Sectors such as telecommunications and logistics can be particularly catalytic. More competitive telco markets lower costs for SMEs to adopt cloud services, enabling remote work, digital payments, and e-commerce participation—pathways to higher productivity. Better port modernisation and customs digitalisation reduce lead times for exporters and importers, making Philippine firms more attractive partners in ASEAN supply chains.

Practical measures to improve reliability—lessons for the region
Policymakers across Southeast Asia can draw practical lessons from Philippine and regional experiences:

• Track operational reliability metrics, not just installed capacity. Publish uptime statistics for utilities, average repair times, and frequency of interruptions. Transparent metrics create accountability and help target investments.
• Combine central grid upgrades with localised solutions. In the Philippines, microgrids, solar-plus-storage installations, and targeted distribution upgrades for island economies mitigate the higher costs and logistical challenges of archipelagic connectivity.
• Encourage competition and regulatory clarity in utilities. Relaxed foreign ownership rules in telecoms and investment-friendly frameworks for independent power producers (IPPs) tend to improve service quality and reduce prices over time.
• Digitise processes end-to-end. From online business registration to e-customs and digital permitting, procedural digitisation reduces the time firms spend navigating bureaucracy and complements improvements in physical infrastructure.
• Target SME support. Offer co-financing or subsidy schemes for SMEs to adopt reliable backup solutions in transition periods, paired with incentives to reinvest savings into productivity-enhancing technologies.
• Build resilience into logistics. Port congestion in Metro Manila, for instance, has pushed shippers to use alternative ports like Batangas, Cebu or Subic. Investing in multimodal connections and optimising hinterland links reduces the vulnerability of supply chains to local disruptions.

Broader implications across Southeast Asia

As ASEAN economies industrialise and expand services, the policy lens must shift from merely increasing infrastructure stock to ensuring its day-to-day stability. The Philippines’s experience underscores that predictability—measured in minutes of uptime, not gigawatts of capacity—drives firms’ decisions to invest and integrate into regional value chains.

Countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia face similar trade-offs: where headline projects boost national capacity, it is operational reliability that determines whether firms actually upgrade technology, hire more staff, or enter export markets.

Also Read: Are startups neglecting the future middle-class population in Philippines?

Investors, too, are sensitive to these dynamics. Multinationals assessing factory locations weigh not just cost and labour but the probability of meeting contractual uptime obligations. As Southeast Asia competes to move up the value chain into semiconductors, electric vehicle components and higher-end electronics, infrastructure reliability will increasingly be a differentiator.

Conclusion

The Philippines offers a practical blueprint for unlocking hidden productivity: elevate the operational reliability of infrastructure, pair physical upgrades with digital procedural reforms, and foster competitive utility markets. For Southeast Asia, the message is clear—investing in reliability is not a second-order concern; it is a central, silent engine that will determine whether the region can translate infrastructure projects into sustained firm-level productivity, broader regional integration and long-run economic growth.

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Walk into any co-working space, accelerator office, or industry event, and you will hear the incessant, almost hypnotic whisper: “Your network is your net worth.”

This axiom has morphed from a helpful reminder into the most sophisticated form of collective time theft in modern entrepreneurship. It pressures founders into a mandatory, ritualistic consumption of generalised networking with the endless coffee meetings, the sprawling conference cocktail hours, and the mastermind group sessions.

The reality is brutal: for the early-stage founder, the cost of maintaining a vast, shallow network far outweighs its actual commercial value. The majority of time spent networking is not productive; it is where founders go to feel validated instead of feeling the painful pressure of real customer acquisition.

This is the Networking-to-Death Trap, and it is quietly killing the focus, the runway, and the structural integrity of otherwise promising companies.

The opportunity overload

The core problem with generalised networking is that it generates opportunity overload.

Every handshake, every business card exchanged, every LinkedIn acceptance carries a micro-cost of processing. A founder who attends four events a week is bombarded with low-signal, high-volume inputs: invitations to irrelevant podcasts, pitches from overpriced service providers, and advice from mentors who solved a problem five years ago in a different market.

This noise does not lead to strategic insight; it leads to strategic paralysis.

Also Read: Networking is expanding, but execution still lags

The founder becomes addicted to the possibility of a major connection, chasing the mythical US$100 million deal that will come from a cold introduction, while neglecting the grinding, essential work that generates reliable, compounding revenue:

• Deep customer conversations: The only person who truly matters to your survival is the customer willing to pay a high price to solve their acute pain. These customers are not found at generalised networking events; they are found through focused, vertical outreach in their specific industry trenches.
• Core product fortification: Every hour spent debating the merits of a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation at a founder retreat is an hour not spent improving your product’s stability, security, or core feature set.

The generalised network promises immediate comfort and psychological support, but it delivers crippling distractions. It replaces the necessary, painful isolation of deep work with the soft, seductive illusion of being busy.

The power of vertical isolation

The most successful disruptive companies are built through selective, vertical isolation. This strategy focuses on generating leverage through depth, not breadth.

• Rule 1: Isolate the customer: Your network should not be comprised of other founders; it should be comprised of your ideal, paying customers and the two or three most influential experts who speak their language. Do not attend a “Tech Startup Mixer”; attend a conference for Heads of Supply Chain in the Cold Storage Industry, even if you are only selling software.
• Rule 2: The two-hour rule: The founder’s calendar should treat external meetings as a limited, precious resource. If the meeting does not directly result in a signed contract, a critical hire, or the resolution of a technical dependency within the next 90 days, it must be ruthlessly relegated to a low-priority slot or rejected entirely. The opportunity cost of a two-hour networking lunch is easily $500 worth of focused engineering time.
• Rule 3: Optimise for the asynchronous win: Leverage your community for knowledge exchange only when it is asynchronous and non-disruptive. Use highly specialised, focused online forums or private communication channels where the input is highly targeted and searchable. This allows the founder to extract the high-value insight without suffering the time commitment of a live conversation.

Also Read: What are some networking benefits that are essential for startups?

The general community operates on the principle of serendipity, where the hope is that a random encounter will solve your biggest problem. The serious founder operates on the principle of design, meticulously engineering the exact inputs needed to reach a specific, immediate business outcome.

Founders need to be ruthlessly honest about their calendar. Most networking is a sophisticated form of peer review, where founders seek validation from each other to avoid the terrifying, objective judgment of the market. The time spent collecting hundreds of shallow contacts is time stolen from building the product so unique that those contacts would eventually chase you.

Look at your calendar for the last month. How many hours were spent in meetings or events that generated revenue, versus hours spent in meetings that generated only optimism? If your company’s survival depends on the random chance of a handshake, is your business model strong enough, or are you mistaking socialising for strategy?

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After facilitating leadership workshops across different organisations, I began noticing something interesting. Some groups needed constant encouragement just to participate, while others required only a small prompt before the room filled with energy, debate, and shared thinking.

The difference was rarely about intelligence, seniority, or company size. It was about maturity – not the age of the team, but how they think and learn together.

Over time, three patterns consistently emerged whenever I worked with mature teams.

Mature teams are noisy, in the right way

The first sign is noise. Productive noise.

When working with mature teams, a simple question from the facilitator often sparks layered conversations almost immediately. Participants challenge assumptions, build on each other’s ideas, and connect discussions to real operational experiences. The session stops feeling like a workshop and starts resembling an executive conversation already in motion.

This happens because experienced teams carry accumulated reflections into the room. They have navigated crises, misaligned strategies, and difficult decisions before. Training becomes a space to recalibrate rather than to discover leadership for the first time.

More importantly, people speak freely. They are less concerned about appearing wrong or disagreeing publicly because psychological safety already exists within the group. Members trust that expressing a view will not damage relationships or reputations.

For facilitators, this is often the moment when leadership development becomes meaningful. Engagement is no longer driven by exercises; it is driven by ownership. The team treats learning as part of work itself, not an interruption from it.

Also Read: Why Southeast Asia’s edutech must go beyond chatbots to truly transform learning

Mature teams disagree without breaking trust

Another reliable signal of maturity is visible disagreement.

In younger teams, silence is often mistaken for alignment. Participants defer to hierarchy or wait for consensus before contributing. Mature teams behave differently. Diverse opinions surface quickly, and opposing viewpoints are voiced openly.

I teach improv-inspired communication principles, particularly the idea of “yes, and.” Interestingly, mature teams rarely respond with immediate agreement. Instead, they demonstrate a more nuanced version of it. Someone may acknowledge a colleague’s reasoning, introduce an alternative perspective, and then carefully connect both ideas before advancing their own position.

The conversation becomes additive rather than adversarial. Participants feel heard even when opinions diverge, and debate turns into collective sense-making instead of personal validation.

In many leadership trainings, organisations aim to build psychological safety. Mature teams reveal what it actually looks like in practice: trust strong enough to allow challenge without fragmentation.

Mature teams expand the learning beyond the curriculum

My favourite indicator appears when the workshop stops belonging solely to the facilitator.

Mature teams rarely stay confined within the training framework. Participants bring their own vocabulary, experiences, and intellectual references into the discussion, effectively co-creating the learning environment.

In one session on DISC profiling, a participant introduced the concept of analysis paralysis to explain behavioural patterns we were observing in decision-making styles. In another workshop on growth mindset, someone connected the discussion to the psychology of the Dark Triad, reframing leadership behaviour through a completely different lens.

These moments signal something important. Participants are not absorbing content passively; they are integrating it into their own mental models. Learning becomes translation, not repetition.

Also Read: I came back to coding after 20 years, and the fault line on my team was nothing like I expected

Early in my facilitation journey, such moments made me slightly uneasy. Over time, I learned that effective facilitation sometimes means becoming a student in real time, asking participants to elaborate, and letting expertise move in multiple directions rather than one.

When teams feel safe enough to extend the curriculum, leadership development shifts from instruction to collective intelligence.

Maturity is not about time

Team maturity is often mistaken for tenure or organisational age. Yet I have seen long-standing leadership teams remain cautious, while young startup teams demonstrate remarkable openness and ownership.

Maturity is visible in how teams operate daily: how they challenge one another, how they learn together, and whether individuals feel responsible for outcomes beyond their own roles.

The most effective leadership training does not create maturity overnight. Instead, it surfaces conversations teams have avoided, accelerates alignment that is still forming, and gives structure to trust that is already emerging.

And perhaps this is where the real question sits for leaders and organisations: what kind of leadership development do you actually bring into your team? Not just to transfer knowledge, but to shape how your people think together, disagree safely, and build on each other’s ideas in real time.

Because mature teams are not an accident. They are intentionally cultivated through the right conversations, the right reflections, and often, the right facilitation that helps those moments emerge and stick.

And perhaps that is the real goal of any leadership development effort: not merely to teach new skills, but to help teams grow into environments where learning, disagreement, and contribution happen naturally – with the right support to make those moments visible, and meaningful, when they matter most.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

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100×100 (previously Wavemaker Impact), the Singapore-based climate company builder behind a clutch of Asia-focused startups, has launched a US$100 million second fund to assemble and scale 50 new firms across Southeast Asia and India.

The move cements a growing trend: investors and builders are shifting from pure software bets to hands-on venture creation to turn climate technologies into commercially viable businesses in the region.

A builder, not just a backer

100×100’s model is deliberate and prescriptive. Rather than seeding existing early-stage startups, the firm partners with seasoned entrepreneurs to co-found companies from scratch. Each venture is designed with an explicit commercial target, US$100 million in revenue, and an emissions abatement ambition of 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over its lifetime. The firm says it will focus on energy, food, materials, and supply-chain sectors where demand, geopolitical shifts, and resource constraints are reshaping markets.

Also Read: Climate tech’s shift from doing good to doing well

Founding partner Marie Cheong framed the thesis succinctly: “Our name reflects our conviction that profit and carbon reduction are not a trade-off, but a multiplier. With Fund II, we are doubling down on a demonstrated strategy with a platform that is ready-to-go.” The quote underlines 100×100’s pitch: build ventures that exploit a ‘green discount’, delivering cost or economic advantages while cutting emissions.

Why Southeast Asia and India matter

The Southeast Asian and South Asian markets are central to 100×100’s strategy for several reasons. The region accounts for a considerable share of global emissions from agriculture, industry, and power generation, while simultaneously undergoing rapid industrialisation, manufacturing reshoring, and infrastructure expansion. These dynamics create fertile ground for technologies that lower costs and emissions, especially those that can be embedded into supply chains or scaled across large, fragmented markets.

Quentin Vaquette, another founding partner, bluntly argued the regional case: “Southeast and South Asia sit at the intersection of the world’s most urgent challenges, holding a disproportionate share of global emissions while increasingly becoming a key region for manufacturing reshoring, AI infrastructure buildout, and food system redesign.”

100×100’s stated target is ambitious: collectively, the ventures it builds should reduce 10 per cent of global emissions, a claim that signals the scale it intends to pursue.

Track record and traction

Fund II follows Fund I, which closed at a US$60 million hard cap in 2023. The firm says its initial cohort has produced fast-moving results: 27 co-founded companies across eight countries, a portfolio survival rate nearly double the median venture capital average, and portfolio companies operating at roughly 1.5 times greater capital efficiency than typical VC-backed startups. External validation includes demand from institutional and strategic backers such as the US Development Finance Corporation, Singapore’s Economic Development Board, and British International Investment, among others.

Also Read: Funded: SEA climate tech has US$1.1B and a problem no one wants to name

The portfolio has produced concrete commercial cases. Rize, a company that reduces methane emissions in rice cultivation and serves smallholder farmers, reportedly delivered US$11 million in revenue in 2025 with 550 per cent year-on-year growth, while improving livelihoods for over 40,000 farmers. Helios, a residential solar provider in the Philippines, is cited as growing at more than 40 per cent month-on-month over the past year. Such metrics are central to 100×100’s argument that its venture-building model accelerates commercial product-market fit faster than traditional funding routes.

How the venture builder works

100×100 employs a structured process to locate white spaces in high-emissions sectors. The firm says it speaks to over 1,000 experienced founders each year to identify operators with domain expertise who can lead scalable companies from day one. It takes larger equity stakes than traditional VCs and embeds operational support and playbooks into the early stages, effectively trading a higher level of involvement for quicker, more efficient scaling.

The ‘green discount’ concept is worth unpacking: rather than positioning climate products as premium add-ons, 100×100 seeks ideas that reduce unit costs or improve productivity while simultaneously lowering emissions, making them more likely to be adopted at scale in price-sensitive markets across Southeast Asia and India.

Regional implications and challenges

100×100’s expansion is timely, but not without obstacles. Commercialising hardware-intensive or industrial-process innovations in Southeast Asia involves high capital intensity, complex supply chains, and regulatory fragmentation. Local partners, distribution networks and long sales cycles, especially for industrial and agricultural customers, remain hurdles. The firm’s playbook of co-founding companies with experienced founders and taking larger equity stakes is explicitly designed to mitigate some of these operational risks.

Also Read: ‘The next generation of unicorns will be from greentech’: Wavemaker Impact’s Steve Melhuish

For Southeast Asia, the model offers potential benefits beyond emissions reductions. If the builder can scale firms that reduce costs for manufacturers or farmers, the region could capture more value in emerging supply chains, particularly as multinational companies reorient production away from concentrated centres. That could translate into job creation, technology transfer, and greater regional resilience.

What investors are buying

Institutional backers of Fund II are effectively betting on a repeatable engine for climate company creation in markets that are often seen as difficult for pure-play climate tech investors. The claim of near-top-quartile performance, higher capital efficiency, and rapid revenue growth will be closely watched by LPs seeking both impact and returns. Whether the model can consistently produce US$100-million revenue companies and deliver massive abatement across 50 new ventures remains to be proven at scale.

Closing thoughts

100×100’s US$100 million Fund II is a bold bet that the most impactful climate solutions in Southeast Asia and India will emerge from active venture building rather than passive capital allocation. Its early results offer reasons for cautious optimism: fast revenue growth, strong founder engagement, and a focused sector strategy. The coming years will test whether the studio’s playbook can convert ambitious climate and commercial targets into a pipeline of durable, regionally rooted companies that reshape how emissions-intensive industries operate across Asia.

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In my previous article, I traced how the companies that built the internet lost the distinct cultures and identities that made them formidable, optimised into homogeneity by the same growth logic that made them successful. Now I will move to examine how AI has impacted this process. 

The first thing to understand about Big Tech’s AI pivot is that it was not a strategic decision.

Across all AI-centric announcements in Big Tech, the language is identical: Transformative. At scale. Across our entire product surface. It’s not just the language; the investor calls, consumer messaging, acquisitions, and internal decks all follow the same patterns and ideas. 

Every major technology company is now, officially, an AI company, having arrived at this conclusion within roughly the same window, having made roughly the same infrastructure bets, and having restructured roughly the same proportion of their workforces to fund them. The probability that this represents independent strategic convergence of all these organisations is frankly ridiculous. They are making strategic calls simply based on what their competitors are doing to maintain an illusion of “competitiveness”. 

René Girard, the French anthropologist and literary theorist, called it mimetic desire: the observation that humans do not independently decide what to want, but want what they see others wanting. Applied to organisations, it produces what he called a mimetic crisis, which refers a state in which rivals, having imitated each other into near-identical positions, stop competing over what is actually valuable and start competing over the appearance of competition.

This is supported by DiMaggio and Powell, who observed that organisations under pressure from external stakeholders (like investors) don’t innovate, but imitate the competition, converging on whatever behaviour their peers have already legitimised, purely because it’s seen as safe and deals with the anxiety of innovation uncertainty. 

The AI pivot is, therefore, a mimetic crisis at an industrial scale. The fear of missing a rival’s gain has become more powerful than any assessment of whether the gain is real. 

The AI pivot is, by any honest reading, a mimetic crisis. Every major technology company is now, officially, an AI company. The announcements are indistinguishable, and all contain the same words in the same order: transformative, at scale, across our entire product surface. What is harder to find, in most cases, is evidence that this is producing value for the people who use the products.

Studies from Goldman Sachs and MIT have questioned whether enterprise AI spending generates productivity gains proportionate to the investment. The technology is being deployed ahead of demonstrated value, which is not a description of a confident strategy. It is a description of mimetic panic, as nobody wants to be the company that missed the wave.

Meanwhile, the jobs supposedly being augmented by AI are being eliminated by the same companies making the loudest noise about AI’s transformative potential. The mimetic crisis requires a resolution, and Girard argued that resolution historically comes through the scapegoat mechanism wherein the community unifies around the sacrifice of an arbitrary victim, temporarily relieving the tension of rivalry.

Also Read: A 65% probability explains the next likely move for Bitcoin as leverage clears

In corporate terms, it refers to the moment when the AI bubble deflates, and a single company is singled out as the cautionary tale while the larger players quietly reassess this investment.

What the bubble produces

To understand where mimetic capital flows when it chases a narrative ahead of validated products, consider Cluely.

Cluely was founded in 2025 by two Columbia University students, one of whom had been expelled for using an earlier version of the tool to cheat through an Amazon technical interview. The product was honest about this: an AI overlay that sits invisibly on your screen during video calls and feeds you answers in real time.

Within months, it had raised US$5.3 million in seed funding, then a US$15 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at approximately US$120 million. All of this, for a company with an unclear business model, a viral marketing strategy, and revenue numbers that turned out, in March 2026, to be fabricated. The CEO admitted on X that the US$7 million ARR figure he had given to TechCrunch the previous summer was a lie.

The company has since rebranded as an AI meeting note-taker.

Cluely is not an anomaly, but is a case study in what DiMaggio and Powell’s mimetic isomorphism looks like at the level of venture capital: under conditions of uncertainty, investors copy other investors. As the field signals that this is the kind of company worth investing in, the logic of missing out becomes more powerful than the logic of performing due diligence. By 2025, AI captured close to 50 per cent of all global venture funding: over US$200 billion, up from 34 per cent the year before.

The terror of being the one who missed the next OpenAI has become more powerful than any assessment of individual companies. The object of desire ( AI value) has receded and has been replaced by an obsession to win the investment war.

The most significant threats to the monoculture are being built by companies quietly constructing alternatives to the platforms the monoculture depends on.

Linux desktop usage has historically been a running joke: it’s always the year of Linux on the desktop, but never quite. Framework, a new age PC and laptop manufacturer with a distinct cultural identity around repairability, now ships laptops with Linux as a first-class option, which sold out prior to its Windows counterpart.

Lenovo ThinkPads come with Linux pre-installed. The developer community has shifted significantly toward Linux-based workflows. This is not yet a mass-market story, but it represents, in DiMaggio and Powell’s terms, coercive isomorphic pressure running in reverse: an external force that makes the dominant platform’s continued stagnation costly, rather than safe.

The gaming front is more significant. Windows has historically been the stickiest consumer use case: the reason people tolerated everything else about it. Valve’s Steam Deck changed that. A Linux-based device that runs an enormous proportion of the Steam library with fewer power requirements.

SteamOS is now expanding beyond the Deck due to its contributions to the WINE platform and the Proton compatibility layer (both of which are free). Valve quietly built a gaming ecosystem that no longer requires Windows to function. That is a disruption in the structural sense, which has led to Windows and Xbox’s newfound focus on improving their services as of late.

Also Read: Emotional intelligence makes AI training stick

The reckoning

The current market is an example of DiMaggio and Powell’s iron cage: organisations that have become so optimised for legitimacy to appear correct to investors, regulators, and each other, that they have lost the ability to actually be anything in particular.

The companies that built the internet had something the current iteration has optimised away: cultural density, the very thing that makes a company relatable and marketable to consumers in choice-based markets like consumer technology.

Girard was clear about how mimetic crises resolve: scapegoats. The dot-com correction produced its scapegoats in companies like Pets.com and Webvan. The scapegoat is never the system itself, but an organisation within the system, selected to make the system appear self-correcting. Cluely may serve this function, or it could be a tech giant, or another one of the thousands of new-age tech companies. 

What breaks the cycle is the alternative. Valve didn’t announce a strategy to challenge Windows; it simply built a device, then a platform, then an ecosystem, until the alternative structurally competes with the market leader. Framework didn’t publish a manifesto; it simply made excellent products in line with its simple mission of repairability and customisability.

The irony is that isomorphism has made differentiation easier, not harder. When every large tech company looks, sounds, and feels the same, being genuinely excellent at something specific and being honest about what you believe in is a competitive advantage of unusual power. The only problem is that the conditions that produce that kind of strangeness are precisely what institutional success destroys. 

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

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