There's a moment I keep returning to. A founder shows me something and I can't tell if it's a product, a research project, or a capability in search of a problem. The category doesn't exist. The user behavior hasn't been observed. The science doesn't know how it meets the world yet.
But the founder can feel it. Not because they have a thesis about the market — they usually don't, not yet. Because they've spent years inside a specific technical problem, and that contact has built something in them. A sensitivity to what's real before anyone else can see it.
That's what I want to name. Seven posts to build the vocabulary for it.
Now the thing underneath.
This series has been about what happens when a technology meets the world. But there's a deeper question. What happens before the meeting — when the world doesn't have a category for what you're building. When the user behaviors don't exist yet. When the founder themselves can't say whether this is a product, a platform, or something that doesn't have a word.
Shape work lives in the territory before categories crystallize. Before anyone knows what to call it. Before the market has a name for what's emerging. The shape problem here isn't which container fits the technology. It's that the containers don't exist yet.
I think of a founder I work with. Years building a capability nobody was asking for — something so ahead of the market that every pitch frame felt wrong. The kind of patience that looks like stubbornness from the outside. But they could feel — in the architecture, in the way the technology responded to certain problems and resisted others — when a new application was real and when it was noise. That wasn't analysis. It was years of contact with the material, compressed into instinct. The same quality that makes a ceramicist reach for a different clay before they can explain why.
That's acquired taste. Not taste as aesthetic preference. Taste as the accumulated capacity to sit inside a space where nothing has a name yet without collapsing it prematurely. Built through friction — the kind I've been writing about across this entire series. Every tension held, every shape that didn't resolve, every room where the argument wouldn't settle — that friction was building something. Not a framework. A feel.
The founders who do this work are creating categories, not picking them. The categories don't pre-exist. They emerge through sustained contact with the problem — through years of the kind of shape work this series describes. Holding the tension between what the technology can do and what the world is ready for. Staying in it. Until something crystallizes that nobody could have seen from the outside.
This is where I believe the returns that define eras actually live. Not in better pattern matching. In the accumulated taste of founders who've stayed in pre-categorical space long enough to feel what's coming.
I have my own version of this capacity, built alongside a team I'm privileged to work with. We've backed suborbital cargo, orbital robotics, local-first technology before it had a name, transformer architectures before ChatGPT, encrypted computation before it had a market, decentralized science before anyone called it DeSci. None of these had a category when we first sat down. That's what category creation looks like — not what I do alone, but what the team has learned to feel together.
Not every founder starts from the unknown. Some have something working in an existing category — real traction, real customers, a shape that holds. The question is the same: how do we help them find the category that's theirs. The one that doesn't exist yet but that their technology is trying to become.
In all of it, what I'm recognizing is the founder's work. My job is to not collapse the space too early — to create the conditions where their taste can do its own work.
This is expensive. More time, more presence, more willingness to stay uncomfortable. It's not supposed to be efficient. It's supposed to be real.
Acquired taste doesn't compress toward commodity. Everything else is compressing — execution, research, analysis, positioning. But the capacity to navigate genuinely unmapped territory, to stay in a room where nothing has a name and not reach for the nearest framework — that was assembled through encounters so specific they can't be separated from the people and the rooms that produced them.
It's a deeply human quality. The founder whose years of contact with a problem gave them a sensitivity nobody else has. The investor whose accumulated rooms gave them a feel for when that sensitivity is real. Built the same way. Through staying.
Shape work started as a name for something I kept noticing. It's become something else — a discipline, a vocabulary, a practice I keep showing up for. But underneath it all, I think, is this: the willingness to stay in the space before the names arrive. To trust the discomfort of not knowing what this is yet. To sit with a founder in a room where neither of you can say what this becomes — and to stay anyway, because something holds.
That's acquired taste. The thing that doesn't compress. The thing that compounds. The thing that stays human no matter what else gets cheap.
It's not a moat. It's a practice. And the practice is: stay.