Hotkey Startups

When interfaces disappear

Watching a child pinch-zoom a photo reveals how much digital bureaucracy we've accepted. Menus, buttons, sliders—interfaces we thought were necessary were just walls between intention and action.

This is why I call them "hotkey startups"—companies that build behaviors so natural, so ingrained, that returning to the old way feels impossible. Like how Ctrl+C became muscle memory for copy, these startups rewire how we work at a fundamental level.

Watch someone use Cursor's AI-powered code editor and you'll see why. What looks like hitting tab for autocomplete is actually the elimination of an artificial barrier: the gap between thinking about code and writing it. Traditional IDEs suddenly feel like translators for a language we shouldn't need to speak.

These hotkey startups don't win by building better versions of existing interfaces. They win by removing them entirely. Google didn't build a better directory—they made categorization irrelevant. ChatGPT didn't build better search results—they made us forget we were searching at all. Each interface they remove reveals another barrier we didn't need.

This creates an impossible dilemma for incumbents: either copy the natural interface and admit you've been building unnecessary complexity, or stick to your artificial paradigm and become obsolete. Every time we see a company desperately holding onto their old interface—like BlackBerry insisting on physical keyboards while touch interfaces took over—we're watching this dilemma play out.

The next wave of hotkey startups won't win by building better features. They'll win by identifying these artificial barriers—the interfaces we built to work around technology's limitations—and finally removing them entirely.