<Section title="Where the phrase comes from">Faster horses is the first of three types of innovation — borrowed from Rory Sutherland — that Nabeel Hyatt uses to describe what he hunts for as an investor. It names incremental improvement: making an existing thing a bit better rather than inventing a new category.</Section> <Section title="Why Nabeel avoids it">In this episode, most venture funding flows toward faster horses, and Nabeel says most of those bets get "arbitraged out of existence" within four years — the improvements are so obvious and so crowded that they stop being defensible. That's why he steers away from this category and instead looks for what he calls Japanese toilets of AI: products that surprise you with delight before you knew you needed them, like Granola. He contrasts both with the third type, teleportation — the grand, obvious dream like Cruise and self-driving cars that everyone wants but nobody knows how to build yet.</Section> <KeyPoints> - Faster horses = incremental improvement on something that already exists. - Most venture funding goes here, and most of it gets arbitraged away within four years. - Nabeel's real target is the opposite: subtle, hard-to-execute new experiences like Granola.</KeyPoints>