A moderated panel on markets before they had a name
Roys · Moderator
Beckman · LEAP
Walter · Code19
Lauer · Adom“There's no market for that.”
Five self-defeating words.
Five little words no founder wants to hear, and one of the most short-sighted clichés in business. Because someone, somewhere, is jumping on a hidden opportunity — and quietly building a market for it.
Every category-defining company starts the same way: some founder notices the one thing nobody else has clocked yet.
And here's the part nobody tells you — that discovery might be worth millions. Sometimes billions. Sitting right there. In a market everyone else walked past.
This is not a retrospective. This is not a brag-fest where four founders take turns saying “I called it first.” This is a working session. Pattern recognition, live, in front of you — the exact kind you need to be running in your own industry starting Monday.
We're going to get into how these four people read weak signals before anyone else did — and what almost made them miss it. Million-dollar near-miss for some. Billion-dollar near-miss for one of them.
Then they'll tell you what they're watching for next.
You leave with a sharper eye and an actual framework — so you can find your own hidden market before somebody else slaps their name on it first.
Finding the billion-dollar opportunity everyone else missed.
Built MotionSafe long before regulators mandated it or Wall Street priced it in — seeing what the auto industry refused to: 280 million connected vehicles generating sensitive, unprotected personal data with no plan to shield it. That's not a gap; it's a market hiding in plain sight, a pattern he's monetized across multiple funded ventures.
Leads LEAP, the Colorado space company built on a reframe: orbit isn't a destination, it's a delivery route. In 2026, LEAP's reusable Bullfrog vehicle became one of the first to demonstrate a working space-logistics run.
Co-founded Code19, the world's first professional autonomous racing team — using the track as a live testbed for dual-use AI that automotive, defense, and industrial clients will need next.
Built Simplewire, one of the first business text-messaging platforms, when SMS was still a novelty, then built Zipwhip and sold it in a $1 billion deal. Now he's building Adom in Fort Worth, Texas: the world's first AI electronics prototyping cloud lab, where AI designs real circuit boards and an on-site fab delivers finished boards in four hours. While the world stares at the $600 billion chip market, he's betting on the roughly $85 billion printed circuit board market hiding right under it, and on American-made electronics before the rest catches on.
Space, autonomy, mobility data, and messaging look unrelated — until you line up how each founder read the same kind of early signal.
Each founder built the wrong version of the company at least once. What they changed — and when — is the real lesson.
The panel closes by turning the lens on the audience's own industries: what's the signal nobody in the room has priced in yet?
All three panelists are actively building — this is live pattern recognition from people still in it, not a retrospective.