Hi friend,
Being around founders every day resets your baseline for what's possible. Most people spend their time managing existing systems. Founders spend theirs trying to break them. They’re on a completely different operating frequency, and it's contagious.
The other thing I've noticed: founders live slightly ahead of everyone else. They're not describing the world as it is, but rather, they're describing it as it will be once they're done with it.
There's a lot of anxiety in the air about what AI means for work..and I get it. When the cost of cognition is falling this fast, the question of who benefits and who doesn't is legitimate. I've asked versions of it about venture capital.
The fear underneath most of that anxiety is the lump-of-labor fallacy: the assumption that there's a fixed quantity of useful work in the world, and if AI does more of it, people do less. But that's not how demand works. When the steam engine made coal extraction more efficient, Britain didn't consume less coal. It consumed dramatically more, because cheaper energy unlocked uses that weren't economically viable before. That pattern repeated with electrification, with computing, with the internet. Each time a general-purpose technology drove input costs down, the addressable market expanded faster than the automation displaced workers.
New business formation in the United States is now at the highest levels in recorded history. iOS app releases are up 60% year over year. To me, these are all pieces of the same story.
For a founder genuinely obsessed with a problem, the dynamic is identical. Cheaper, faster tools don't reduce the compulsion to build. They expand the surface area of what one person can attempt.
Every week I'm in a room with someone building something that a team their size couldn't have attempted two years ago. I'm genuinely excited about what this next era of company building looks like.
