The Lightning Strike That Worked

We published the piece below in January 2022, days after Meta’s rebrand keynote. We’re leaving it up, because it’s still the clearest illustration we have of what a Lightning Strike is — and because what happened next is more instructive than being right would have been. Our note from today is at the bottom.

A perfect Lightning Strike

A lot has been written about the metaverse: what it is, what it isn’t, what it might be, and mostly how people feel about the uncertainty of it all. I’m not going to add to that part of the conversation. What’s more interesting is something closer to our own work — Zuckerberg’s near-perfect execution of a Lightning Strike.

A Lightning Strike is the public announcement and staking of your claim in a new category. It’s a specific move in category design, the discipline of deliberately creating and developing new market categories, and it’s one of the few moments where a company gets to set the terms of a conversation before anyone else has words for it.

You might think Meta merely adopted the term “metaverse,” roughly as described in the 1992 novel Snow Crash. But there’s more here than borrowing a word.

Articulating a complete vision

Zuckerberg presented a vision for a virtual space in which you socialize, work, and play, where your avatar reflects your personality and you interact with people who aren’t physically near you. Technologists might call this a logical next step from what the inventors of the internet already imagined, or an evolution of Roblox or Second Life. Fair enough.

But from a business and societal perspective, he did what nobody else had: pulled it together and laid it out as one coherent vision. And he was the right person to do it — it had to be someone with the means and the power to push it forward. Meta had already been building parts of what he described. The Chinese giants had been investing heavily in the same area. Oculus headsets were early iterations of how users would eventually interact. 5G networks were arriving as more than faster pipes: they deliver computing power at the edge, useful once you’re wearing a lightweight pair of AR glasses in public.

Remember when the iPhone made everyone rebuild everything “on mobile”? It’s safe to say we’ll see a lot of the same kind of activity “in metaverse.”

Translating existing paradigms onto a new technology is, in itself, boring — even if it produces the revenue that funds real R&D. It’s only when artists, technologists, and crazy thinkers start pushing the possibilities that you get transformational work. That’s the exciting part.

Transformational change requires a wide landscape of actors

Transformational work takes time, and trials, and failures. So it’s necessary to get as many people as possible thinking about a thing before it fully exists. That’s what the Lightning Strike is for. I believe Zuckerberg when he says he doesn’t want to build the metaverse but for the metaverse.

An ecosystem of players who can each offer their own vision, their own additions, and crucially price their products independently is what turns an idea into a real market category with a thriving landscape of actors.

By devoting nearly an entire annual keynote to the topic — with renderings, sample implementations, visualizations of what it might look and feel like — they made it tangible. They gave people something to react to. Something to project onto, to think “hell, no!” or “yes, that!” or “yes, but with a few tweaks.”

Even the doubters and haters supply a relevant part of the discourse. Everyone’s talking about it. And when you talk about the metaverse, you immediately think about Meta, the company.

That’s a perfectly executed Lightning Strike, right there.

What we’d add now

Four years on, the strike itself still grades out well on its own terms. Meta got the word into everyone’s mouth, made itself the reference point, and forced an entire industry to have an opinion. If you want to see the mechanics of a Lightning Strike executed by someone with unlimited budget and total control of the stage, this is still the tape to study.

And the category collapsed anyway. Meta’s own attention moved to AI. “Metaverse” became shorthand for corporate overreach. Almost none of the world described in that keynote arrived.

So what went wrong, given that the execution didn’t?

The strike was aimed at a category the market hadn’t agreed was a problem. A Lightning Strike is a claim on a problem — you name something people are already suffering and declare yourself the answer. The strongest category design work begins with a real, felt, currently-unnamed frustration. The metaverse keynote inverted that: it named a solution and went looking for the problem afterward. No amount of production value fixes that ordering.

Owning the word is not the same as owning the category. Meta won the term so completely that when the term became a liability, they owned that too. A category name is an asset with a beta attached. If you claim one, you’re claiming its downside as well — which is an argument for naming something you can actually deliver, rather than the largest thing you can imagine.

Timing is part of the claim, not separate from it. Zuckerberg was describing a world that needed hardware nobody had, at a price nobody would pay. A Lightning Strike works when the audience can take a step toward the thing this quarter. If the first available action is “wait several years,” you’ve spent your one moment of undivided attention on a promise.

None of that makes the original read wrong. It makes it incomplete, and in a useful direction: a perfectly executed Lightning Strike on a badly chosen category is a very expensive way to be memorable.

If you’re planning to plant a flag, the question worth answering first isn’t how loudly you can announce it. It’s whether the thing you’re naming is a problem your market already has. That’s the conversation we’d want to have with you.