Al Ramadan and Dave Peterson – Author Biography
Early Life
Al Ramadan and Dave Peterson are Silicon Valley operators turned advisors. Both built careers in the technology industry’s marketing and strategy trenches before co-founding an advisory practice devoted to a single question: why do some companies create entire markets while better products fail?
Career
Ramadan and Peterson founded the Silicon Valley advisory firm Play Bigger, where they counselled startups and established companies on market strategy. Drawing on data analysis and interviews with executives at companies such as Salesforce, Uber, and Amazon, they — together with Christopher Lochhead and journalist Kevin Maney — wrote Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets (2016). The book introduced “category design” to a wide business audience and became a standard text for founders and marketers.
Major Works
Play Bigger (2016, with Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney) is their landmark work.
Writing Style and Themes
The book’s voice is energetic and contrarian — a playbook rather than a memoir. Its central themes are that the category, not the product, is the strategy; that companies must condition the market to demand their solution; and that “category kings” earn the majority of a market’s value. Concepts like the “point of view,” ecosystem design, and the “lightning strike” gave practitioners a shared vocabulary.
Legacy
Ramadan and Peterson helped make category design a recognised discipline in startup and marketing culture, influencing how a generation of founders thinks about positioning and competition.
