If you want to compete at elite levels you must own your own intelligence, otherwise you are compromised.
Your business is not yours, your secrets are not yours, your work is not yours. If it goes in it belongs to whoever provides you the intelligence. It will be used, whether you like it or not.
Anything you build, write or do with the assistance of AI will be analysed, profiled, recorded, replicated, tested, and devoured.
If you have something valuable it will be stripped of every detail that made it happen, and it will be replicated and mass produced by those with the levers.
This is the pattern every wrapper startup quietly dreads. A company builds its whole product around ‘AI inside your Slack,’ raises on it, hires on it; and then the model provider ships it natively in one announcement.
The lesson isn’t ‘don’t build on platforms.’ It’s that if the only thing between you and the platform is a thin integration layer, you were always renting your moat. What survives this cycle is whoever owns distribution, proprietary context, or a workflow the model genuinely can’t see.
Introducing Claude Tag, a new way for teams to work with Claude.
In Slack, Claude joins as a team member with access to the channels and tools you choose. Tag Claude in and delegate tasks to it while you focus on other work.
@i_mika_el I agree that better products matter when distribution brings customers. Currently, there is trend to create communities of potential users and then selling to them.
Everyone is talking about AI agents building websites, apps, SaaS products, landing pages, and entire businesses.
I think we’re focusing on the wrong thing.
Building is no longer the hard part.
A few years ago, if you wanted to launch a product, you needed developers, designers, infrastructure, and months of work.
Today, anyone can open ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, or v0 and have a working product in days, sometimes hours.
The barrier to creation is collapsing.
But the barrier to distribution isn’t.
You can generate code.
You can generate designs.
You can generate content.
You can even generate an entire startup.
What AI can’t magically generate is attention.
And attention is becoming the scarcest resource.
The next generation of billion-dollar companies won’t win because they build better products.
They’ll win because they build better distribution systems.
The companies that master:
• Audience building
• Community creation
• Trust
• Brand
• Partnerships
• Network effects
• Distribution channels
will dominate markets where everyone has access to the same AI tools.
We’re entering a world where products become commodities much faster than before.
When everyone can build, the advantage shifts elsewhere.
The moat is no longer “Can you build it?”
The moat is “Can you get people to care?”
The future belongs to founders who understand distribution as deeply as previous generations understood software engineering.
AI is democratizing creation.
Distribution remains the real game.
And whichever company cracks AI-native distribution at scale may become one of the most valuable companies of the next decade.
@16vchq Take https://t.co/fjdUj2Qtzz from its first paying founders to its first 100.
It’s live today: an AI coworker that runs a solo founder’s company on autopilot, right from WhatsApp. The fellowship is for cracking free to paid into a repeatable engine. 🚀
What if most of the CEOs compensations are structured in this way?
Elon Musk’s compensation package at SpaceX is structured around two targets. The first award vests if the company reaches a valuation of $7.5 trillion and establishes a permanent human colony on Mars of at least one million people. The second vests if SpaceX operates data centers in space that draw at least 100 terawatts of power, more than 1,000x the consumption of every data center on Earth combined. Miss both, and Musk earns nothing but the $54,080 salary he has been paid since 2019.
I’m building AI company brain. 🧠
I’m looking to connect with people working in:
🤖 AI / agents
🔀 Orchestration
🎨 Designers
🚀 SaaS founders
Whether you’re building this, buying it, or thinking hard about it - let’s talk.
Shipping for solo founders. Reply or DM. 👇
The thing that lasts isn’t which model you rent. It’s the learning loop you build on top of it.
Most companies are picking the best model and calling it strategy. The real game is owning the layer where your knowledge compounds.
“Swap the model without losing your company’s hard-won expertise” is a genuinely important design principle; and guess who’s best positioned to provide that layer?