AGL 227: Play Bigger with Kevin Maney

About Kevin

Kevin Maney is a bestselling author and award-winning columnist. He has been writing about technology for 30 years, has interviewed most of the tech pioneers you can name, and brings broad and deep context to Category Design conversations. He is co-author of the book Play Bigger, and has been an A-list writer and thinker about technology for 25 years.

Kevin’s most recent book is UnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance, which proposes a new category of healthcare. It is co-authored with Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst and Stephen Klasko, CEO of Jefferson Health. Kevin and Hemant also co-authored the 2018 book Unscaled: How AI and a New Generation of Upstarts Are Creating the Economy of the Future.

His other books include The Two-Second Advantage (a 2011 New York Times best seller), Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On and Others Don’t, and The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson Sr. and the Making of IBM.

Kevin wrote a regular column for Newsweek, and has been a contributor to Fortune, The Atlantic, Fast Company and ABC News, among other media outlets. He was a contributing editor at Conde Nast Portfolio and for 22 years, Kevin was a columnist, editor and reporter at USA Today.

He’s appeared frequently on television and radio, including CNN, CBS Sunday Morning and NPR, and lectures at conferences and universities. Kevin has collaborated with CEOs and worked on projects in partnership with companies such as Cisco and Qualcomm.

He also writes music for and plays in a New York band, Total Blam Blam.


Today We Talked About

  • Kevin’s background
  • AI
  • 6/10 Law
  • Being a Category King
  • Creating a new Category
  • What problem is there to solve?
    • An unsolved  problem is a new category
  • Chrysler in the 1980s
  • Enduring as a Category King
  • Where Good Ideas Come From
  • The Adjacent Possible
  • Tesla and Netflix
  • Noodle.ai story
  • AI is the new Electricity

Connect with Kevin


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