Sometimes it feels like I’m at an amusement park. That excitement of building a startup, conceiving the product and watching it take shape and hit the streets that used to take months now lasts just a few days or even hours.
If for a product-minded founder that was already fun, what we can experience today is like comparing a ride on the Ferris wheel to a ride on a roller coaster.
For those just playing around with building products, pulling old projects out of the drawer and letting their imagination run wild, it’s all good fun. But in the real world of software, the adrenaline is comparable to the feeling you might fall out of the cart mid-loop. Billion-dollar giants like Atlassian suffering on the stock market and laying off en masse are signs of an era being disrupted.
I saw this coming in 2023. Building software startups was going to get a lot riskier if anyone with a few prompts could put together software in a matter of hours. What could we bring that was special enough to justify our existence as a startup?
Three years later, we do in fact have vibe-coded applications changing the world in a matter of weeks. A few months ago, the big bet inside OpenAI was how long it would take for the first one-person unicorn to emerge. Last month the company acqui-hired OpenClaw, bringing on its founder Peter Steinberger for a billion-dollar figure. That probably settled a few wagers internally.
Anyone starting a tech business today is going to do it very differently from how they would have four years ago. A solo founder can iterate dozens, hundreds of times in a single day with AI to build their product. If they need to align with a co-founder, that already takes more time. If they need to get a five-person squad on the same page, their solo competitor has already left them in the dust on development speed. A corporation that needs to align hundreds or thousands of people might genuinely be in trouble.
But wait. Isn’t development speed what defines product and organizational success? It just isn’t a constraint anymore. So what is? Clarity on the customer’s pain to build the right product? Operational efficiency? Pricing, product breadth? Or intangible attributes like irreverence, lightness, reliability, beauty?
There’s no single right answer, because every industry is its own world and every business is its own business. But whatever it is, I believe it’s going to become a lot clearer. When the ability to build product becomes a commodity, what truly defines business success has to come into sharp focus. Getting clear on what makes your business unique, its essence, and channeling that into the product, the brand, the communication and the culture — that is the founder’s real work in this new era.