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“In times of extreme stress, the whole concept of fitness, at least in a Darwinian sense, loses its meaning.”
Elizabeth Kolbert
I’ve watched a lot of markets come and go in 6 years of building Trends.vc.
Partway through, ChatGPT arrived and intelligence got cheap.
Some markets vanished. Others grew.
Evolution can explain why one market dies and another grows.
Ecologists study how environments change. When a drought or an ice age hits, some species go extinct and some hang on in a smaller range.
Other species carry on almost unchanged, because the disruption never touched what they depend on.
Others thrive, because the disruption cleared their competition or fed them directly.
New species appear where nothing lived before.
Markets take the same routes.
| Route | What it looks like in a market |
|---|---|
| Gone | The thing you sold is what the disruption replaced |
| Hurt | The market survives, the margin leaves |
| Unchanged | The market never depended on what changed |
| Thriving | Demand rises because of the disruption |
| New | A market that had no name before |
1) Gone. Chegg sold intelligence, packaged as homework answers.
When ChatGPT gave the same answers away free, students stopped paying for them.
Chegg has lost about 99% of its market value since its 2021 peak near $14.7 billion.
2) Hurt. Bill negotiators phone a cable company and argue the price down. Billshark takes 40% of what it saves you. BillCutterz, running since 2009, takes 50%.
A machine makes that phone call now. Pine AI says 150,000 people have used it.
Kudos, a wallet app, sells a flat subscription instead of taking a cut.
3) Unchanged. Barbers kept cutting hair.
Machines learned to write essays before they learned to wield scissors.
4) Thriving. Electricians are in more demand because intelligence got cheap.
Each data center is a building somebody has to wire.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 9% growth for electricians from 2025 to 2035, against 3.5% for all occupations.
5) New. Mercor sells expert training data for AI models.
It reached a $10 billion valuation by October 2025 recruiting ex-Goldman, ex-McKinsey and elite-law-firm people.
Take a disruption you can see coming, run a market through it and ask which of the five routes it lands in.
🧬
What could you offer that cheap intelligence makes scarce?
