Startup Sensing Is Now a Core Skill

Sensing has to become a habit, not an event or credit offerings.

There was a time when only the legacy corporates would admit they couldn’t keep up. “We’re too slow, too siloed, too far from the edge,” they’d say, usually right before launching another innovation program destined for the graveyard six quarters later.

This year, something changed. I started hearing the same line from the hyperscalers and high-growth vendors, the folks who used to set the pace. A friend at a leading cloud provider pulled me aside: “We’re getting surprised by where the next AI founders are coming from. Even large pre-IPO private companies and well-known public tech companies are scrambling to map the new crop of native AI enterprise customers.” When the picks-and-shovels crowd starts losing line of sight, you know the market’s moving faster than any one company’s radar.