Comment by hypfer
16 hours ago
Feels like a category error.
It's a slide deck telling people what a product can do (that's a normal thing to release for a company), but the thing it tries to sell you on is building your own business based on their tool.
Which makes no sense the way they sell it, because "founding a business" is no standard process that could be formalized in a way like that, nor does it make sense for society to have people founding businesses at a scale comparable with mowing your lawn or doing your taxes.
All of this feels just unreal because it is unreal. Founding cannot be a commodity. If it is, you have no moat or point, meaning you instantly collapse again, because you are an interchangeable commodity.
It makes sense if you think of 'founder' as an identity like 'influencer', rather than 'someone actually seriously founding a business'; just as with influencers, some people will make a lot of money doing it for real, but many, many more will post enthusiastically on social media, living the aesthetic.
A lot of people already treat being a founder/entrepreneur as who they are, not what they do--witness the endless tide of LinkedIn posting about hustle culture, divorced from reality. This is an extension of startup chic.
this is well said. and to me this is crazy and sad at the same time.
An enormous amount of LinkedIn appears to be more about gatekeeping what other people can do than doing anything yourself.
They sell decorations, refreshment, cakes, costumes, games, and invitations for Founder Cosplay Parties.
"Founding cannot be a commodity. If it is, you have no moat or point, meaning you instantly collapse again, because you are an interchangeable commodity."
IMHO you still need to find the product and PMF
There are bunch of books startup world recommends which sort of all start from the principle of product, users, traction.
This is sort of scaffolding around that. It's not entirely insane to try to formalize this process - there already are books that do this (Bill Aulet, Disciplined entrepreneurship).
"nor does it make sense for society to have people founding businesses at a scale"
Maybe not at scale of moving lawns but I'm pretty sure the world is full of nichces that still lack specific software offering or where options of software offerings are limited.
This is like "Uber for logging" or "time reservation system for cat dentists" level of "take existing product category and apply to a domain you know".
So not every cat dentist needs to found a cat dentist time reservation app but I'm sure there are niches withing niches with business opportunities awaiting.
Yesssss. think there is a wealth of opportunity here in strictly non-scalable, probably even strictly non-profitable ways.
Where "founder" paints exactly the opposite image of what it really does unlock: everyone being able to build or tweak a little app they need; tailored just for their use cases.
A market size of a few people, a dozen, or a hundred, who can now get software that exactly services their niche. Something you'd never ever convince someone to build or maintain for you beyond the "smart niece/nephew" charity.
Could be a website for your local soccer league, a Bible reader with different font and bookmark treatment, a chart of your home canning cellar where you can send some jam to your friends and they send you kimchi.
There are probably nigh infinite tiny microcosms of unserved automation and functionality need like this. Where you can make the computer do what YOU need, not what a minimum of thousands-millions of other people mutually needed in the least common denominator.
There might even be a few larger needs in there we've missed, because they never got the chance.
> Uber for logging
Lumberjack gig economy?
Interested.
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Yeah, and these days it really isn't a big deal to build things; it's much bigger challenge to actually develop a distribution channels and cut through the noise. I think people are just overwhelmed with everything and attention span is shorter and shorter. And that's the real issue - what I am finding now is that again the thing that really works is good old actual human conversation with potential clients.
We have seen that category in the past, in MLM.
Perhaps now it’s only two levels but still somehow pyramid shaped.
> Which makes no sense the way they sell it, because "founding a business" is no standard process that could be formalized in a way like that
It makes no sense, but most technical people wished it could be like that and that's who this article is aimed at
Yes but that means that it is lying in people's face. Really just straight-up lying. No fancy words to soften it. Just lies.
Lying is bad.
As said in Seinfeld: "Jerry, just remember. Is not a lie, if you believe it"
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Their argument on page 10 is that now agentic coding reduces the effort of writing code there will be far more failures unless you validate the idea properly.
We are actually seeing that in that the number of apps on the app stores is increasing but usage is not increasing.
Some would argue that the right process will lead to the right results.
> there will be far more failures unless you validate the idea properly
You are exactly correct! You're very insightful to see that AI is perfect for validating ideas. It's not just sucking up, it's swallowing. Would you like to delve into coding up a Synchopancy as a Service web site?
Hah. Poe's law.
The barrier to entry drops and so more garbage enters the market. This has happened many many times but there can be a massive and beautiful paradigm shift at the same time. Think about YouTube. Most stuff on there is garbage, but compare the good stuff of today to pre-YouTube content. To be quite honest, I think most of the best media is going straight onto YouTube.
I think a lot of founding is pretty much a commodity, e.g coming up with a viable idea and then implementing it has become rather easy now with these tools. The real barriers are access to capital and clients. From the startup I joined (I'm the 6th person) I see how much the founders personal connections are important. That indeed can't be commoditized yet. But the process of coming up with an idea and iterating on it ? The founders didn't even come up with our idea - they thought of something initially but the investor led them to his own idea - totally different. That's how the company was born. Now the first clients are connected to the investors. Etc.
So access to capital and clients, connections ,that's the last standing moat I think.
It's a commodity in the same way that making music is a commodity (i.e. using production tools to make it sound good). But music today is so much more generic and boring than it used to be.
You seem to be mistaking the "rules" of the ZIRP SV nonsense bubble for the rules of reality.
Understandably so, but still.
It’s reasonable to say that there are things like discovery and validation that are necessary for every startup (to succeed) and that some techniques for these can be automated.
That we can describe something like “validation” in the abstract and automate some part of it says nothing about whether it’s worthwhile. I’m hard pressed to think of anything that anyone pays for that doesn’t meet this description. Why should being a founder be special or different?
> Founding cannot be a commodity. If it is, you have no moat or point, meaning you instantly collapse again, because you are an interchangeable commodity.
With the recent AMD announcement [1], local models are likely the future indeed. Cloud will be the place for remote sessions, remote agents, continuous agents. But I foresee a place where phones, laptops, PCs, and even perhaps dedicated hardware just for AI, will be the place for most AI-related workloads.
Welcome to the world of companies founded by business school grads. No soul, no moat, just an endless cycle of KPIs and billion-dollar exits to PE.
Come on, get out of here with this “only true programmers can found a real company”
Such gatekeeping.
>nor does it make sense for society to have people founding businesses at a scale comparable with mowing your lawn or doing your taxes
It absolutely does. AI and robots drives the cost of labour down; it's good for capital, bad for labor. If everyone is a business owner then everyone can benefit. A hundred years ago the majority of Americans were self-employed; mass wage labor is a recent phenomenon.
If that’s what’s actually going to happen. If people start businesses entirely dependent on Anthropic’s ecosystem, they’re more akin to drivers for Uber who basically are employees now stripped of employee wage protection.
If it’s a guy starting his own taxi service with his own app he paid a guy $2000 in Ukraine to produce (as a guy where I live did), that’s different.
The same is true of building a startup based on Rails or React.
Maybe next we can get a blog post from Herman Miller telling you the “playbook” for how to run your startup on tables and chairs.
> "founding a business" is no standard process that could be formalized
Does experience founding a business make you better at founding another, unrelated business? I would say it does to some extent.
It often doesn’t. A common mistake of a successful founder is thinking they can repeat it. Those who can are exceedingly rare.
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