And that relates to the lack of timelines and focus on how long things took around 2020 BC, that is Before Claude. Building a startup isn't like having a lemonade stand as a kid where you just don't bother to do it if you forget to buy lemons or it's rainy or something more fun comes along. There's a significant compound interest element to startups that's easy to overlook. Your codebase grows over time and so does your feature set and that collection of features attracts customers in a way one thing might not. You learn as go, of course, too.

This seems particularly relevant to the GTM section, which I was particularly amused by since that's what I'm focused on right now. It's a long game. Your blog post doesn't get found by anyone in Google until you've built up your SEO mojo, your LinkedIn post isn't read without the followers you need to accumulate and your content has to get engagement for people to see it even then, you don't start off line with a million followers on X, etc.

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.

"<filename>-05062026_v3 (1).pdf"

So there were 4 iterations on 5th of June alone for this document

This is fairly funny coming from the company whose employees report merging in hundreds of PRs per engineer per day, and accidentally leaked their own source code through a security misconfiguration in a package manager they own.

Even if you believe AI-native startup is the future (the comments are divided), you would at least want to hear from an impartial source.

This is just marketing material.

I had a bit of a laugh. The non-technical business experts are much more likely to achieve success than the technical experts. They can actually talk to the customer and get the customer to care. No quantity of GPUs and gas turbines can correct for a lack of personality or reputation. The technology is generally not the hard part in most businesses, despite the extreme efforts of certain technology people to make it seem so.

There’s just too much invested, in terms of beliefs and money into the idea that founders are special and therefore deserve seven-eight figures off of the capital pumped into their unprofitable products.

You’ll see it here in comments. People will defend A”I” applied to software engineering wherever (not) possible, but building companies? Now listen buddy there’s an irreplaceable human genius at work.

There is something that will never change for being a founder, you need to sell, and for that you need network and credibility. It was never about the building, its all about the selling. AI has not changed that.

As someone who was the technical co-founder of a company before AI, I really feel like a lot of that role can be done by AI, if the foundation is laid appropriately.

(Technically that also applies to MS Teams, Google and so on and not just AI)

From 2015-2019 I spent the whole time saying "If I don't write the code nobody does". It was the point of saying to do anything requires a team, to build that team you need funding. It was a vicious cycle and took a long time to get enough traction to raise funding and do that... and then you end up in the MVP loop -> hire -> build -> validate -> rehire -> rebuild -> revalidate. Today all of that has changed. You don't necessarily need the team to write the code, it's for a different function entirely, maybe the original function which is the team was the orchestration engine for all the different pieces at play to make a company and product successful. The code is only half the equation. Looking forward to seeing how solo entrepreneurs leverage these tools and how teams transform using them.

Stats please

So either go viral or go home.

Obviously personal connections, timing, market position all play role but let's be honest - this is not something that can be planned although in retrospect it may seem so. A % of the population will get all of this right many times in a roll but this is just mathematical certainty.

Loss of objectivity

The challenge: Ask an AI tool for evidence supporting what you already believe, and it will find it. Confirmation bias now comes with a research engine.

Who knows, maybe an AI ideated and AI created product will be the best app of 2026.

It's kind of analogous to how I'm writing code right now. For simple stuff or low priority stuff I'll fire claude at it and won't look at the code if it works. But for the important stuff I'm very carefully integrated into the cycle making sure what's coming out at the end is just right. I'm carefully constructing prompt loops and validation cycles to make sure what comes out looks like what I want - because I have the knowledge and experience of what works for my specific use case. Drafting an investor memo seems like the second category of thing, you need it to be right. I don't think claude offers much of value there. What's more - if you start slopping your investors, you are going to piss them off. Unless Claude is going to say it has some special data source it's used to train on so it knows good from bad, I think this is a bad idea.

This article also kind of fits in the category of "Here's how to use AI for EVERYTHING!" and actually it would be far more valuable to say "This is the bits that AI is good at, and here's where you need to do it yourself" - which is obviously a position that Anthropic can't hold.

I've noticed that seemingly every single tech company has re-branded themselves as "AI" company. Add a RAG system and you're now AI. Add a AI-chatbot, and you're now AI.

Founders are individual contributors? Hmmmm.

But for shortening the time from product to customer, you still need to figure that out

Just think about website design, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that a non ai design website will outperform an ai designed one. These percentages add up in multiple disciplines.

I would argue betting against ai is your best chance of succeeding frankly (not in all cases but certainly as displayed here)

step 2: find a way to solve that problem for less money than they are willing to pay

step 3: AI???

Right now, people with ideas prompt their LLM by saying "I know how to make x, how do I turn that into a business?" Anthropic knows that, and releasing a playbook like this is a way to make people who haven't asked that question think to ask it.

For a non-technical person with a small business they don't know how to operationalize, an agentic workflow is a game changer. You might go from only getting 30% of your work time to build and improve your actual product to 50% or 70%.

Can you imagine having a knitting business, and suddenly being able to gauge interest for different colors with a website selector you'd have no idea how to automate? Or needing to close your shop for an upcoming holiday, and having Google and Apple Maps and your website all updated to reflect your closed dates cleanly, without having to fight through every UI? An engineer goes "bah", a baker goes "I just got to sleep two more hours".

I truly think that people in the tech industry do not understand how hard technology is for people who aren't in it.

Here is the direct link to the slides:

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6889473510b50328dbb70ae6/...

Detail-oriented work with lots of output that can cover up the noisy bits of thoughtless garbage? Sure, great.

Analysis-oriented work where decisions have consequences over large amounts of resources? Only an idiot would use these tools for that.

Maybe as a conversational note-taker, but anything more and you don't know what you're doing.

The cope here is that no one will build there own Shopify or SalesForce or Airtable because “the selling is the hard part.” They don’t need to sell and market it for those SaaS to fall.

I just passed the idea stage and then hit the MVP stage with a prototype with a potential customer who's definitely said they would buy it!

And I'm noticing there's going to be a whole bunch of other things that I haven't thought of around actually running this thing and the timing is perfect for this playbook!

Like what do we really still need?

Most riches nowadays are created by entertainment or scams :/

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6889473510b50328dbb70ae6/...

Similar to Shopify and all the make money online dropshipping slop they produce.