I asked an ecommerce founder last week what would change about his business if his team had an extra 20 hours a week of research and analysis capacity.
He described a completely different company. The decisions would be better, the launches would be faster, and the positioning would be tighter.
Then I showed him that the AI setup to get those 20 hours costs less than one freelancer for one week. He'd been thinking about AI as a line item when the better way to think about it is as a capacity multiplier on the team he already has.
@APompliano Smarter at specific tasks inside defined contexts, yes. But they still need a human to decide what problem is worth solving in the first place. That gap is closing though, and you're right that most people haven't sat with what that actually means.
@plainionist The compiler as the world's most patient code reviewer that never gets tired of explaining why your memory management is wrong. Actually makes sense.
@FedericoNoemie The 1 or 8 rule is funny but it holds. Two founders sounds balanced until someone has to make the call at 2am and both of you are equally right about opposite things
@geoffreywoo If Claude can navigate any UI without an API, your competitor is just as exposed as you are. The founders who win will be the ones who build on top of that capability before they get replaced by it. Distribution, trust, and proprietary data are still moats, not UI complexity.
@CasJam Two steps before you even pick a problem:
1β£Spend a week just breaking things and asking dumb questions, you need to know what's possible before you can see which problems are worth solving.
2β£Then find the real problem. The project teaches you everything after that.
Distribution ate the product.
The taxi wasn't bad because of the car, it was bad because of everything around the car. Uber fixed the wrapper not the ride.
Uber didn't invent taxis. They made the shitty taxi service obsolete.
If your offer is "slightly better," you'll only stay slightly relevant.
(until youβre not)
@asaio87 The "too dangerous to release" line has become the best marketing in tech. Ship it anyway, call it controlled access, watch the waitlist grow.
@kylegawley Fair shot. Though 'too dangerous for the public' and 'accidentally leaked our own code' being in the same announcement does require some mental gymnastics to sit with.
@Lukealexxander The people who started in January don't just know more tools, they've built intuition for what works and what doesn't. That compounds in a way you can't close by watching a YouTube tutorial in month 7.
@TheGeorgePu Feels less like exclusion and more like controlled rollout. With something this powerful, limiting access early is about safety and iteration, not just privilege. But yeah, let's see whether access broadens or stays concentrated, thatβs what will define the impact.
@ALEngineered The asymmetry is the real problem. Offense only needs to be right once. Defense needs to be right every time. And most of the people who need protection aren't in the coalition.