Investor Mike Mignano Bets the Market Won't Go to One Winner

Mike Mignano, a general partner at the venture firm Union Square Ventures and the former founder of the podcast company Anchor, was asked about the fear hanging over every artificial intelligence startup. The companies that build the base models, plus the big cloud providers behind them, can move into any market and take it.

He pushed back, saying that idea is not true and, in his words, not really fun for venture capitalists who have to believe startups can take on giants. Then he gave his rule of thumb. "Usually what you see is that the market winner takes something like 30% of the market, right?" A single winner rarely takes 80 percent or all of it, he argues.

What he means is that being copied does not mean being killed, because startups win by specializing early. He points to design software, where Anthropic, the maker of the Claude assistant, assigned an entire team to go after Figma. Figma, which makes tools for designers, is still, Mignano says, "a business that does multiple billions in revenue and" there are "still multiple players in the space." Customers stick with Figma, he says, because it is a great product and a trusted brand.

He sees the same split in software for programmers. Lovable, an app building tool from Sweden, and Cognition, a maker of coding agents, along with Anthropic's own coding tool Claude Code, have all broken through at once. Lovable has reached about $500 million in yearly recurring revenue, he says. To him, that suggests several winners can thrive side by side.

Mignano says that not that long ago he thought the opposite, that one company or a handful of companies would simply do everything in AI. He now calls that a mistake, and one he has seen before. Ten or 15 years ago, Mignano says, "we thought the same thing about Google" and thought the same about Apple, that they would just take everything.

His reminder comes from music. Spotify, Mignano notes, took on industry behemoths in a classic David and Goliath fight and "could have been killed 50 different ways." It survived, he argues, by specializing and doing "the hard thing early and often." His version now is simple. "They can't do everything. Even the biggest companies can't do everything."