In each technology wave the value, revenue, market cap, profits and great people captured by startups versus incumbents differs. In some waves it all goes to startups, while in others it goes to incumbents or is split between them. Unexpectedly, the prior wave of value from AI roughly all went to incumbents over startups, despite a lot of startup activity. This post explores that dynamic and posits the current unsupervised learning wave of AI will contain strong startup success, in addition to incumbent value.