11 ms·

If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

207 points by tie-in 6mo ago

tyleo 6mo ago
I almost feel like this is always true. Every startup is dead on arrival. Most of them fail. You’ve always needed to constantly learn and innovate to launch a successful business.
- dghlsakjg 6mo ago
  Paul graham wrote about this 11 years ago: https://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html https://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html Startups are mostly all default dead. That's why they need VC money.
kristianc 6mo ago
Well of course it is, most startups are dead on arrival. The big pinch of salt I throw in with advice like this though is that startup failure rate hasn't dramatically shifted despite two decades of lean startup methodology, accelerators, and an entire cottage industry of startup advice. It's never the fault of the framework, mind you.
- apsurd 6mo ago
  isn't this a problem of being able to see whatever we want in the data? For example maybe more startups than ever are created in part due to access to this info. Volume increase but rate doesn't. Or maybe magnitude of success increases. Surely this is true but largely attributed to internet overall. But maybe methodologies are indeed a factor. edit: Tobi from Shopify has an insight that relates. His north star metric is user churn. sounds crazy on its face. he's known for that. But increasing churn means you've increased top line exposure to more would-be entrepreneurs. Not all of them will succeed, but shopifys mission is to create more entrepreneurs. Grow the pie. A focus on increasing conversion tends to have a narrowing effect.
  - kristianc 6mo ago
    Sure, but if the advice works, you'd see failure rate drops over time. It would work like medicine - we have more people than ever before, but almost no one dies of polio anymore. That's not what we see though, failure rate is basically the same.
- PunchyHamster 6mo ago
  Arguably that mostly says stuff about average VC skill to pick winning idea. If you have good product idea, the methodology to get there mostly affect profit marigins, not whether it will be success or total failure
  - sobellian 6mo ago
    Execution is very important. Startups almost never start with the "right" idea.
  - cladopa 6mo ago
    >Arguably that mostly says stuff about average VC skill to pick winning idea. What happens is that the original idea rarely matters at all. It is the people that implements the idea what matters. The original idea is almost always terrible, but great people pivot or change the idea gradually while having contact with reality.
- ralph84 6mo ago
  If anything the failure rate has probably increased with more capital and founders chasing after the same opportunities. Being a startup founder gained prestige and became the default thing to do after college for certain types of people who before the GFC would have ended up in finance.
kdazzle 6mo ago
> the bottleneck is no longer engineering, it’s ____ 90% of blog articles created in the last two years are probably dead on arrival
- kbelder 6mo ago
  Made me wonder if there's a live-streaming equivalent for blogging... some platform that both ensures the reader knows the blogger is a person, and promotes a parasocial relationship. There's live-coding, so it's not totally a crazy idea.
  - amazingamazing 6mo ago
    Radio host
  - raincole 6mo ago
    Isn't it just podcast but text
  - Waterluvian 6mo ago
    Your comment immediately made me think about the extreme opposite: a Davy Force-like, Infochammel-style livestream of a never-ending AI generated Ted Talk, offering delectable morsels of tech startup wisdom, but is ultimately zero calorie.
  - losvedir 6mo ago
    As a way to get my feet wet vibe coding, I made https://seeitwritten.com https://seeitwritten.com with that idea. That by capturing how you write with all its fits and starts you can show that a human wrote it. So, sort of recorded live-streaming. But I'm thinking that a sufficiently cute agent could be prompted to write something and re-write something in a convincing manner. I'm not so sure about that, though, since their corpus is completed text rather than text in action.
    - pona-a 6mo ago
      I don't know if this idea is generally useful. Most of what makes writing a medium worth engaging with is how its presentation is causally insulated from its creation. Well, that is true of other media: film has a whole history of production that you, the viewer, don't witness - being its main difference from theater. But with writing said production cost is trivial, and so is editing: the author doesn't need to commit to a sentence like a director must commit to a shot. This is integral to the identity of the medium, and is what allows writing to be what speech is to cinema: considerably more polished, high-budget, and well-edited conversation with an assumed reader. When you take that away, or make the writer conscious of how their each edit is being surveilled, you do lose that ability to freely revise your thoughts, degrading it back into a form of lightly edited monologue. Whether it is a good or bad thing is irrelevant, but it does result in a much different kind of writing. All the while, the collected writing history itself offers very low SNR: it does contain certain some divergent possibilities, but so does orders more meaningless mistakes, attention lapses, and runaway sentences - all that writing is defined by omitting. But assuming most writers use the keyboard just as some use the cursor to follow their gaze, it does at least impart a cognitive fingerprint, useful for light authenticity detection (unless the author is just rewriting a finished thought they plagiarized from memory) but also profiling. I wrote this, not AI: https://seeitwritten.com/v/ye2p6fgs https://seeitwritten.com/v/ye2p6fgs
operatingthetan 6mo ago
I find the story of a startup founder who entirely missed the developments of the last two years and did absolutely nothing with AI difficult to believe. If that actually happened it's the exception, not the rule. Most startup founders are way more in-tune with AI developments. This makes it sound like Chris (the mentioned founder) is behind marketing people who use LLM bots to post slop on LinkedIn. In that case, yes their startup is most certainly DOA.
- thekuanysh 6mo ago
  Look around, you're most definitely in a bubble. LLMs are bleeding edge by themselves. Using agentic anything is mega bleeding edge. Having something actually working reliably is a tiny sliver of the bleeding edge audience. We have barely entered early adoption phase. Most AI users out there are Q&A'ing it and they have no idea what agents, tool calling or context compaction are.
  - operatingthetan 6mo ago
    I don't follow. Tech startups are bleeding edge. You may be over-generalizing here. I talk a lot of my dev friends, they are all using AI for work. So if Joe Blow at some consulting company is using it, then a SV startup CEO should be too. >Most AI users out there are Q&A'ing it and they have no idea what agents, tool calling or context compaction are. Again, talking about a tech CEO not a random "AI user."
    - thekuanysh 6mo ago
      - Fair enough but tech CEOs aren't necessarily technical, developers or keep up-to-date with the tech on the daily like HN crowd. - The AI jump happened in Q3-Q4 2025 with Opus 4.5 so it's been six months or so? Not long enough. - Most developers out there use AI for their coding work, not for re-envisioning business models.
      - operatingthetan 6mo ago
thekuanysh 6mo ago
I dig MPO as a term and that's exactly what I think of implementing agentic systems.
rvz 6mo ago
It used to be 90% of startups would unfortunately fail. Now with AI, it is likely going to be 98%.
- whynotmaybe 6mo ago
  Still better odds than winning the lottery right ? Right ?
  - mlvljr 6mo ago
    [dead]
- nvch 6mo ago
  Before AI: 900 of 1000 fail (90%), 100 succeed After AI: 4900 of 5000 fail (98%), 100 succeed Like this?
  - bustah 6mo ago
    [flagged]
amazingamazing 6mo ago
Not if you’re launching a startup based in the real world. Tell me how AI will make a laundromat business DoA? If your business is selling services at 40% margin that are entirely digitally based, then maybe you’ll need to cut some margin, sure.
- SoftTalker 6mo ago
  A laundromat isn't a startup in that sense. There's no potential for exponential growth. A VC would never give you money to open a laundromat, you'd go to a bank and get a business loan for that.
  - nyeah 6mo ago
    Doordash for laundry.
    - hackingonempty 6mo ago
      You jest but I searched "Uber for laundry" and found services partnering with both Uber and Doordash for transportation.
    - skeeter2020 6mo ago
      Washio was an American on-demand laundry cleaning and delivery service. The company was founded in 2013 by Jordan Metzner, Bob Wall, and Juan Dulanto, and raised $17 million in funding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washio_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washio_(company)
    - SoftTalker 6mo ago
      Laundries have offered pickup and delivery since ... forever? It's like pizza. The markets are very local, and the growth opportunity is limited.
      - nyeah 6mo ago
        Taxis have offered pickup and delivery service since forever, and yet here we are.
jopsen 6mo ago
Not being AI focused might mean fewer competitors.
karolist 6mo ago
The post reads like written by someone who read too much about AI rather than tried to build a startup with the help of AI that they advocate so much. I'm still bounded by system design, UX, pricing and feature decisions, if not by the speed of code output, by the review time for sure. Yes, iterating is faster, but we're nowhere near agentic AI loops spitting out working products. Technically it's possible, but then you just spent that time planning and writing the spec up front, which you'd interleave with dev time otherwise. If the product is a simple CRUD database skin, then yeah, chances of success are lower I think, but this is not the type of startups the post seems to write about.
- jnovek 6mo ago
  Are you familiar with Steve Blank? What you’re describing really isn’t his MO at all.
  - stickfigure 6mo ago
    I'm not, but this is not a great introduction. It's handwavy and makes the assumption that AI dev tools are much farther along than they are. I have seen this a lot lately; the farther up the management chain and farther away from putting hands on code, the more confident people seem to be in the power of AI tools. For big complex real world problems, and big complex real worlde codebases, the AIs are helpful but not yet earth shattering. And that helpfulness seems to have plateaued as of late. I am extremely skeptical of posts like this.
    - scyzoryk_xyz 6mo ago
      I will take a lot more hand waving from the 70-something year-old Stanford professor who co-created far-up the chain management paradigms that run a good chunk of the economy. That context kinda changes things but what do I know.
      - antonvs 6mo ago
        So you’re saying he’s majorly complicit in the ultracapitalist dystopia the US has turned into?
apparent 6mo ago
Seems like the headline should have been "is now dead on arrival". As currently written, it fails to convey the temporal aspect that is the focus of the blog post. It also fails to convey that he's actually only talking about startups that were created 2+ years ago, rather than the many AI startups founded in the last 2 years.
fred_is_fred 6mo ago
Chris has been so focused for 5 years that he had no clue about anything else going on in the industry?
- taurath 6mo ago
  It reads to me like the author thinks Chris is an idiot for not selling his automation tech to the defense industry
kayson 6mo ago
> Now, before you build a physical prototype, you can simulate more design variants, create digital twins, and stress-test assumptions earlier and much cheaper than before. Hahahahahahahaha no you can't. The rise of LLMs has done little to nothing in this area because it's very much compute-limited. Digital-twins and other ML-based strategies predate ChatGPT by a long shot. There are definitely places in hardware design where LLMs and agentic workflows will help, but that's largely because the existing tooling is utter garbage, and now the industry has a fire under its ass to make things automatable so they can build their own agents.
0xAntonioo 6mo ago
I read it less as “every startup now needs an AI feature” and more as “your assumptions expire faster than they used to.” That part feels true even if the examples are a bit overstated imo...
- bloody_bit 6mo ago
  True, it increases the trials and errors you can have to receive pmf
givemeethekeys 6mo ago
"You better be doing something in AI" applies to Startups - businesses that are expected to spend every penny as quickly as possible, to meet the metrics needed to raise the next (bigger) round of funding. It is also not the same as, "If you want to be a profitable company...". For that you need to somehow make more money than you are spending.
- all2 6mo ago
  > For that you need to somehow make more money than you are spending. I've had this idea of 'business as reducing entropy' floating around in my head for awhile. It's a neat way to think about the value a business offers to buyers; a washing machine manufacturer is selling reduced time to reduced entropy (clean cloths), spreadsheet software is selling reduced time to understanding (information from tabulated data), and so on. From that perspective, a lot of AI-driven development is failing. We're still in the phase of 'how do we get order out of semi-average chaos?' for LLMs. For ML we're largely past that point. I've been using this framing as a means to guide me towards 'what is actually useful, what might someone actually buy'. I don't have my own business at this point, but its still fun to think about off and on.
  - danielmarkbruce 6mo ago
    Just stop thinking of software products. There are a million businesses offering solid value propositions that need a lot of software to run, but software isn't the product.
  - gottorf 6mo ago
    > I've had this idea of 'business as reducing entropy' floating around in my head for awhile You could generalize this to the purpose of life itself, probably.
  - givemeethekeys 6mo ago
    I think this is application dependent. LLM's are quite good for brainstorming, even if they are not arguably creative, at least they draw from a lot of information that is already out there, which saves me time in researching and learning.
notarobot123 6mo ago
Building SaaS businesses has become a whole lot less capital intensive. Solo founders can go much further than they've been able to previously. New startups probably don't need funding anymore. VC for conventional SaaS is dead.
hyperpape 6mo ago
> Founders who started pre-2025 typically have built a technical stack optimized for a world where software development was bespoke and expensive. Of all the things that AI has changed, tech stacks aren't one of them. The bots will gladly write Typescript, Java, Python, Rust, what have you. They could not give less of a shit.
- dghlsakjg 6mo ago
  I caught that too. What is he getting at? How does the code and infra stack differ at all between a company that is using AI, vs one that is not?
  - ghc 6mo ago
    Here's my take on what he was getting at: Build vs. buy is an eternal question in enterprises. I remember many in-house data teams trying to build tools for "digital transformation" and cloud migration about 10 years ago. The challenge was, building those tools was more expensive than those enterprises could budget for (IT as cost center), so a startup like Snowflake would easily outcompete in-house solutions with their custom, cloud-based tech stack that was necessarily complex because it needed to serve the needs of thousands of customers. If he's right, the build vs. buy equation has shifted more towards build, at least as far as enterprise software is concerned. IT is still a cost center, but in theory an internal team can now handle more requests for custom tools without looking to outside vendors. Essentially the cost of building in-house might be collapsing and therefore enterprise software startups will be serving fewer customers (who would all pay you more because if solving the problem was cheap they'd do it). If you had to build a stack for dozens of customers paying huge amounts of money, how would that stack differ from the stack you'd build to serve thousands of customers? Certainly it wouldn't need to be as scalable! And that's probably what he's getting at. I think what you'd do instead, to capture those higher price point customers, is solve their problems more specifically, in a higher value manner. Many companies already do this, investing far more in field engineers than they do in their tech stack, since customization is essential.
    - hyperpape 6mo ago
jumploops 6mo ago
> How can we throw away years of work? This trap has killed many startups, well before AI. Now that code is cheaper to write, hopefully it becomes less of a problem? In either case, founders should never fall in love with their solutions.
- grtteee 6mo ago
  It’s easier to view it in terms of DCF - the value of a cash flow generating asset = present value of expected cash flows discounted back at a risk discount adjusted rate. In other words what you’ve invested into your existing assets is irrelevant - the cash flows generated by them and the growth assets through future investment, is what matters.
bamazizi 6mo ago
This article resonated with me, especially since I've noticed the fund raising hoopla's in my circle has dramatically dropped. Either investors are tightening the belt so founder-investor fit has crossed into the realm of disillusionment
- bluGill 6mo ago
  It is the economy. Interest rates are up and that will hit startups first since investors have other options that are more likely to be better.
  - tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
    Interest rates hit their peak three years ago and have been falling since. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate
    - bluGill 6mo ago
      They are still up compared to 5 years ago. We also seem to be in a recession (or if not a real recession at least a slow down)
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
jart 6mo ago
If it was stretched before it's definitely snapped now. The only place I see convincing opportunity is resources and commodities.
syngrog66 6mo ago
depends on assumptions. thats the load bearing element. 99.99% of what was true then is still true. its mostly on the fractal churning edges where hyped change happens. things flip-flop too: 2021-2024: good time in US for EV startup 2025: terrible time in US for EV startup 2026 March/April: AWESOME time in world for EV startup focus on fundamentals, not flakey ephemerals 2020: wise to have smart elite software engineers on your team 2021: ditto 2022: ditto 2023: ditto 2024: ditto (is this when ChatGPT launched? dont care. snore) 2025: ditto (what are YC/HN/VC hyping now? snore) 2026: ditto 2027+: ditto, likely
Escafati 6mo ago
One assumption that's also changed: small teams no longer need dedicated QA. Tools like Autonoma (open source, getautonoma.com) use AI agents to generate and run E2E tests in real browsers, and tests self-maintain as your app evolves. One of the things making the solo-founder path more viable.
psychoslave 6mo ago
If you started something at some point, many assumptions are no longer true, and might possibly never have been true at any moment. That said, if you believe universe exists, chances are not null that you are correct. But solipsism might actually be right. In case of doubt, remember that your memory might be mere illusions.
Noaidi 6mo ago
It is insane to me that anyone could look at the US Economy right now and think this was a good time to start a business. Between the war, AI, a pending economic recession (look at bond prices), all I see is failure. Maybe a funeral home, but that is all I can think of.
andai 6mo ago
So previously the bottleneck was production. I'd wager now the bottleneck is willingness to test your hypotheses. The willingness to experience failure as soon as possible. To test and iterate. As technology brings the cost of everything else to 0, psychological costs will predominate. Reality testing is ultimately unavoidable, of course, but I'd guess most people still lean away from that rather than into it. (Our whole culture is set up that way, and most of us get like two decades of Pavlovian conditioning in that direction.) Edit: Expanded here: https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/willingness-to-fail-is-now-a-superpower https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/willingness-to-fail-is-no...
- nateburke 6mo ago
  Add on the compounding effect that "QA" or "test" in someone's job description was viewed as a synonym for "less-highly compensated" over the past few decades, and you have an entire generation of mid career devs with poorly adapted instincts regarding what is valuable in the process of shipping working product. The bottleneck was never coding...
  - canarias_mate 6mo ago
    [flagged]
  - petervandijck 6mo ago
    I keep seeing people say that, but the bottleneck really was, to a large degree, writing the code.
    - DontchaKnowit 6mo ago
      Has never been true in my career.
- garrickvanburen 6mo ago
  I agree, and a willingness to experience failure as soon as possible has always been a competitive advantage. If anything LLM chatbots & synthetic users will make the majority of founders evermore comfortable not testing reality.
wavemode 6mo ago
> https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/UI-vs-AI-Agent.png https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/... The author didn't spend more than, maybe, 30 seconds thinking this through? Information I could've gotten in 3 seconds by opening a screen and looking at a line item, I now have to extract by writing a paragraph to an AI agent (and cross my fingers that nothing I said was ambiguous or misunderstood). And that's supposedly an upgrade?
laughing_abder 6mo ago
[flagged]
- vonnik 6mo ago
  This smells like LLM.
mbesto 6mo ago
> The bottleneck is no longer engineering. It’s moving up the stack to judgment, customer insight for desired outcomes and distribution. My posit is this: engineering never was the bottleneck, or at least hasn't been for 10 years now. Frameworks and best practices are pretty well known at this point. AI is simply exposing this reality to engineers' faces. Proof point - most publicly traded SaaS first businesses S&M equals their R&D spend, if not dwarfs it. You're going to see this even more lopsided going forward.
amoorthy 6mo ago
"a pricing model based on seats, a product roadmap built around features rather than outcomes [is outdated]" I disagree with this. On pricing, I get that agents and tokens can scale in a way that's unrelated to # of users. But for much SaaS software, AI remains helpful to a human and the human remains the receiver of value. Seat-based pricing is easy to understand and you can always layer in token/agent costs thresholds. On features vs. outcomes, the latter is hard to define and measure in many industries. In marketing SaaS, which I know well, you can't often tell what outcome to expect. You have to try a lot of ideas and some will hit. No way a SaaS vendor can guarantee that.
- evanmoran 6mo ago
  I’d add that token pricing doesn’t work for anyone but the frontier models. Everything else will be commodified. So Opus can charge us top prices per token until a lower (or local) model hits parity and then price goes to zero.
- bensyverson 6mo ago
  The argument against seat pricing is that companies will employ fewer people in general. So a 45 person company paying for 10 seats will become a 7 person company paying for one seat. Not sure I agree with this train of thought, but a SaaS CEO made this exact argument to me last week.
ubauba 6mo ago
I think Blank's story is about a guy who missed a $20B market shift in defense VC, not a guy who failed to adopt AI. He's not saying "add AI to your product" or "use AI or die" but more that AI has shifted institutional assumptions about tech stacks, defensibility and fundability. The bottleneck moved up the stack from engineering to judgment, insight and design. Chris lost because he was heads down building while $20B in defense VC was flowing into his exact problem space and he didn't build the boat to capture that wave.
- lesostep 6mo ago
  >> $20B in defense VC "defense VC budget" seems like a generous way of saying "USA attack budget". Not everyone wants to deal with moral implications of building automation for that.
  - ubauba 6mo ago
    Chris might have good reasons to avoid defense. But Blank's point is that he didn't even know the opportunity existed. The issue is not really about a moral choice, more generally it's a situational awareness problem.
    - lesostep 6mo ago
      >> But Blank's point is that he didn't even know the opportunity existed His point is that, true. However, it relies on a big assumption. Blank confidently says that opportunities were missed, and he knows they were missed only because they weren't taken. My counterargument was "Chris could have chosen not to get involved. It's not necessary a lack of awareness on his part"
VladVladikoff 6mo ago
Why not both? When the chat interface fails, you still need a UI to fix things.
dangus 6mo ago
I think this is a lot of fluff supported by a weak anecdote. Chris' company's assumptions are no longer true, but that doesn't apply to everyone's startup. This is mostly a Chris problem. No, not every product can just be a chat window like in the silly little screenshot. If the author actually wrote software they'd realize that, no, AI isn't speeding up development by any more than a modest amount. It's great that we have it and it's removing tedium but it has replaced zero engineers at my company or at any other company of anyone else I know. And no, your company laying off some people isn't because of AI, your startup idea not getting funding is not because of AI, it's because we've been in a regular old recession which is now a developing oil crisis. Interest rates aren't 0% so nobody wants to lend money to infinite startups.
mvkel 6mo ago
Interestingly, this was always true, it's just made more obvious when it takes less time to bring a product to a potential customer. Launching a product was never the finish line; it was always the start line. But technical founders could trick themselves into thinking that building a product was building a business. The same "Lean Startup" rules apply. Build something and get it in front of real people who will pay you for the thing. If they won't, back to the drawing board. The only real "shift" I've seen is that most startups don't actually need VC at all. That's a great thing.
hapless 6mo ago
the best/worst part of this is that it is obviously not written by steve blank. it does not look, read, or track like a steve blank blog piece he obviously generated large parts of this with claude or chatgpt or whatever. i don't know what that means for the rest of us, but boy it's a big ole spike of signal
ajaystream 6mo ago
[dead]
Animats 6mo ago
Note the mention of "systems of record" being unsuitable for the present level of AI. The real question is whether the costs of AI mistakes and hallucinations can be dumped on some external party who can't impose costs on you. If not, there's a problem.
Schlagbohrer 6mo ago
" In the last five years VC Investment in defense startups has gone from zero to $20 billion/year. " Really? No investment in weapons startups 5 years ago? Not even by the CIA-backed VC firms or other SoCal weapons manufacturer networks?
mannyv 6mo ago
'Design for automation.'
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
danish00111 6mo ago
[dead]
aristofun 6mo ago
It’s sad but at the same time reassuring to see more and more of your childhood “heros” revealing their ignorance and lack of wisdom.
elzbardico 6mo ago
> "And if your competitor’s product does the task automatically while yours still waits for a human click, you no longer have a competitive product. The next generation of applications won’t just put information on a screen, they’ll act just like an employee." Oh the joy of unbridled optimism!
touristtam 6mo ago
This blog is borderline unreadable - is there a technical reason this is the case? Or the author isn't able/willing to update his wordpress website?
MrSkelter 6mo ago
Anyone who writes that VC investment in defense was zero five years ago is neither informed nor credible.

207 points by tie-in 6mo ago

tyleo 6mo ago

I almost feel like this is always true. Every startup is dead on arrival. Most of them fail. You’ve always needed to constantly learn and innovate to launch a successful business.

dghlsakjg 6mo ago
Paul graham wrote about this 11 years ago: https://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html https://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html Startups are mostly all default dead. That's why they need VC money.

kristianc 6mo ago

Well of course it is, most startups are dead on arrival. The big pinch of salt I throw in with advice like this though is that startup failure rate hasn't dramatically shifted despite two decades of lean startup methodology, accelerators, and an entire cottage industry of startup advice. It's never the fault of the framework, mind you.

apsurd 6mo ago
isn't this a problem of being able to see whatever we want in the data? For example maybe more startups than ever are created in part due to access to this info. Volume increase but rate doesn't. Or maybe magnitude of success increases. Surely this is true but largely attributed to internet overall. But maybe methodologies are indeed a factor. edit: Tobi from Shopify has an insight that relates. His north star metric is user churn. sounds crazy on its face. he's known for that. But increasing churn means you've increased top line exposure to more would-be entrepreneurs. Not all of them will succeed, but shopifys mission is to create more entrepreneurs. Grow the pie. A focus on increasing conversion tends to have a narrowing effect.
- kristianc 6mo ago
  Sure, but if the advice works, you'd see failure rate drops over time. It would work like medicine - we have more people than ever before, but almost no one dies of polio anymore. That's not what we see though, failure rate is basically the same.
PunchyHamster 6mo ago
Arguably that mostly says stuff about average VC skill to pick winning idea. If you have good product idea, the methodology to get there mostly affect profit marigins, not whether it will be success or total failure
- sobellian 6mo ago
  Execution is very important. Startups almost never start with the "right" idea.
- cladopa 6mo ago
  >Arguably that mostly says stuff about average VC skill to pick winning idea. What happens is that the original idea rarely matters at all. It is the people that implements the idea what matters. The original idea is almost always terrible, but great people pivot or change the idea gradually while having contact with reality.
ralph84 6mo ago
If anything the failure rate has probably increased with more capital and founders chasing after the same opportunities. Being a startup founder gained prestige and became the default thing to do after college for certain types of people who before the GFC would have ended up in finance.

kdazzle 6mo ago

> the bottleneck is no longer engineering, it’s ____ 90% of blog articles created in the last two years are probably dead on arrival

kbelder 6mo ago
Made me wonder if there's a live-streaming equivalent for blogging... some platform that both ensures the reader knows the blogger is a person, and promotes a parasocial relationship. There's live-coding, so it's not totally a crazy idea.
- amazingamazing 6mo ago
  Radio host
- raincole 6mo ago
  Isn't it just podcast but text
- Waterluvian 6mo ago
  Your comment immediately made me think about the extreme opposite: a Davy Force-like, Infochammel-style livestream of a never-ending AI generated Ted Talk, offering delectable morsels of tech startup wisdom, but is ultimately zero calorie.
- losvedir 6mo ago
  As a way to get my feet wet vibe coding, I made https://seeitwritten.com https://seeitwritten.com with that idea. That by capturing how you write with all its fits and starts you can show that a human wrote it. So, sort of recorded live-streaming. But I'm thinking that a sufficiently cute agent could be prompted to write something and re-write something in a convincing manner. I'm not so sure about that, though, since their corpus is completed text rather than text in action.
  - pona-a 6mo ago
    I don't know if this idea is generally useful. Most of what makes writing a medium worth engaging with is how its presentation is causally insulated from its creation. Well, that is true of other media: film has a whole history of production that you, the viewer, don't witness - being its main difference from theater. But with writing said production cost is trivial, and so is editing: the author doesn't need to commit to a sentence like a director must commit to a shot. This is integral to the identity of the medium, and is what allows writing to be what speech is to cinema: considerably more polished, high-budget, and well-edited conversation with an assumed reader. When you take that away, or make the writer conscious of how their each edit is being surveilled, you do lose that ability to freely revise your thoughts, degrading it back into a form of lightly edited monologue. Whether it is a good or bad thing is irrelevant, but it does result in a much different kind of writing. All the while, the collected writing history itself offers very low SNR: it does contain certain some divergent possibilities, but so does orders more meaningless mistakes, attention lapses, and runaway sentences - all that writing is defined by omitting. But assuming most writers use the keyboard just as some use the cursor to follow their gaze, it does at least impart a cognitive fingerprint, useful for light authenticity detection (unless the author is just rewriting a finished thought they plagiarized from memory) but also profiling. I wrote this, not AI: https://seeitwritten.com/v/ye2p6fgs https://seeitwritten.com/v/ye2p6fgs

operatingthetan 6mo ago

I find the story of a startup founder who entirely missed the developments of the last two years and did absolutely nothing with AI difficult to believe. If that actually happened it's the exception, not the rule. Most startup founders are way more in-tune with AI developments. This makes it sound like Chris (the mentioned founder) is behind marketing people who use LLM bots to post slop on LinkedIn. In that case, yes their startup is most certainly DOA.

thekuanysh 6mo ago
Look around, you're most definitely in a bubble. LLMs are bleeding edge by themselves. Using agentic anything is mega bleeding edge. Having something actually working reliably is a tiny sliver of the bleeding edge audience. We have barely entered early adoption phase. Most AI users out there are Q&A'ing it and they have no idea what agents, tool calling or context compaction are.
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  I don't follow. Tech startups are bleeding edge. You may be over-generalizing here. I talk a lot of my dev friends, they are all using AI for work. So if Joe Blow at some consulting company is using it, then a SV startup CEO should be too. >Most AI users out there are Q&A'ing it and they have no idea what agents, tool calling or context compaction are. Again, talking about a tech CEO not a random "AI user."
  - thekuanysh 6mo ago
    - Fair enough but tech CEOs aren't necessarily technical, developers or keep up-to-date with the tech on the daily like HN crowd. - The AI jump happened in Q3-Q4 2025 with Opus 4.5 so it's been six months or so? Not long enough. - Most developers out there use AI for their coding work, not for re-envisioning business models.
    - operatingthetan 6mo ago

thekuanysh 6mo ago

I dig MPO as a term and that's exactly what I think of implementing agentic systems.

rvz 6mo ago

It used to be 90% of startups would unfortunately fail. Now with AI, it is likely going to be 98%.

whynotmaybe 6mo ago
Still better odds than winning the lottery right ? Right ?
- mlvljr 6mo ago
  [dead]
nvch 6mo ago
Before AI: 900 of 1000 fail (90%), 100 succeed After AI: 4900 of 5000 fail (98%), 100 succeed Like this?
- bustah 6mo ago
  [flagged]

amazingamazing 6mo ago

Not if you’re launching a startup based in the real world. Tell me how AI will make a laundromat business DoA? If your business is selling services at 40% margin that are entirely digitally based, then maybe you’ll need to cut some margin, sure.

SoftTalker 6mo ago
A laundromat isn't a startup in that sense. There's no potential for exponential growth. A VC would never give you money to open a laundromat, you'd go to a bank and get a business loan for that.
- nyeah 6mo ago
  Doordash for laundry.
  - hackingonempty 6mo ago
    You jest but I searched "Uber for laundry" and found services partnering with both Uber and Doordash for transportation.
  - skeeter2020 6mo ago
    Washio was an American on-demand laundry cleaning and delivery service. The company was founded in 2013 by Jordan Metzner, Bob Wall, and Juan Dulanto, and raised $17 million in funding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washio_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washio_(company)
  - SoftTalker 6mo ago
    Laundries have offered pickup and delivery since ... forever? It's like pizza. The markets are very local, and the growth opportunity is limited.
    - nyeah 6mo ago
      Taxis have offered pickup and delivery service since forever, and yet here we are.

jopsen 6mo ago

Not being AI focused might mean fewer competitors.

karolist 6mo ago

The post reads like written by someone who read too much about AI rather than tried to build a startup with the help of AI that they advocate so much. I'm still bounded by system design, UX, pricing and feature decisions, if not by the speed of code output, by the review time for sure. Yes, iterating is faster, but we're nowhere near agentic AI loops spitting out working products. Technically it's possible, but then you just spent that time planning and writing the spec up front, which you'd interleave with dev time otherwise. If the product is a simple CRUD database skin, then yeah, chances of success are lower I think, but this is not the type of startups the post seems to write about.

jnovek 6mo ago
Are you familiar with Steve Blank? What you’re describing really isn’t his MO at all.
- stickfigure 6mo ago
  I'm not, but this is not a great introduction. It's handwavy and makes the assumption that AI dev tools are much farther along than they are. I have seen this a lot lately; the farther up the management chain and farther away from putting hands on code, the more confident people seem to be in the power of AI tools. For big complex real world problems, and big complex real worlde codebases, the AIs are helpful but not yet earth shattering. And that helpfulness seems to have plateaued as of late. I am extremely skeptical of posts like this.
  - scyzoryk_xyz 6mo ago
    I will take a lot more hand waving from the 70-something year-old Stanford professor who co-created far-up the chain management paradigms that run a good chunk of the economy. That context kinda changes things but what do I know.
    - antonvs 6mo ago
      So you’re saying he’s majorly complicit in the ultracapitalist dystopia the US has turned into?

apparent 6mo ago

Seems like the headline should have been "is now dead on arrival". As currently written, it fails to convey the temporal aspect that is the focus of the blog post. It also fails to convey that he's actually only talking about startups that were created 2+ years ago, rather than the many AI startups founded in the last 2 years.

fred_is_fred 6mo ago

Chris has been so focused for 5 years that he had no clue about anything else going on in the industry?

taurath 6mo ago
It reads to me like the author thinks Chris is an idiot for not selling his automation tech to the defense industry

kayson 6mo ago

> Now, before you build a physical prototype, you can simulate more design variants, create digital twins, and stress-test assumptions earlier and much cheaper than before. Hahahahahahahaha no you can't. The rise of LLMs has done little to nothing in this area because it's very much compute-limited. Digital-twins and other ML-based strategies predate ChatGPT by a long shot. There are definitely places in hardware design where LLMs and agentic workflows will help, but that's largely because the existing tooling is utter garbage, and now the industry has a fire under its ass to make things automatable so they can build their own agents.

0xAntonioo 6mo ago

I read it less as “every startup now needs an AI feature” and more as “your assumptions expire faster than they used to.” That part feels true even if the examples are a bit overstated imo...

bloody_bit 6mo ago
True, it increases the trials and errors you can have to receive pmf

givemeethekeys 6mo ago

"You better be doing something in AI" applies to Startups - businesses that are expected to spend every penny as quickly as possible, to meet the metrics needed to raise the next (bigger) round of funding. It is also not the same as, "If you want to be a profitable company...". For that you need to somehow make more money than you are spending.

all2 6mo ago
> For that you need to somehow make more money than you are spending. I've had this idea of 'business as reducing entropy' floating around in my head for awhile. It's a neat way to think about the value a business offers to buyers; a washing machine manufacturer is selling reduced time to reduced entropy (clean cloths), spreadsheet software is selling reduced time to understanding (information from tabulated data), and so on. From that perspective, a lot of AI-driven development is failing. We're still in the phase of 'how do we get order out of semi-average chaos?' for LLMs. For ML we're largely past that point. I've been using this framing as a means to guide me towards 'what is actually useful, what might someone actually buy'. I don't have my own business at this point, but its still fun to think about off and on.
- danielmarkbruce 6mo ago
  Just stop thinking of software products. There are a million businesses offering solid value propositions that need a lot of software to run, but software isn't the product.
- gottorf 6mo ago
  > I've had this idea of 'business as reducing entropy' floating around in my head for awhile You could generalize this to the purpose of life itself, probably.
- givemeethekeys 6mo ago
  I think this is application dependent. LLM's are quite good for brainstorming, even if they are not arguably creative, at least they draw from a lot of information that is already out there, which saves me time in researching and learning.

notarobot123 6mo ago

Building SaaS businesses has become a whole lot less capital intensive. Solo founders can go much further than they've been able to previously. New startups probably don't need funding anymore. VC for conventional SaaS is dead.

hyperpape 6mo ago

> Founders who started pre-2025 typically have built a technical stack optimized for a world where software development was bespoke and expensive. Of all the things that AI has changed, tech stacks aren't one of them. The bots will gladly write Typescript, Java, Python, Rust, what have you. They could not give less of a shit.

dghlsakjg 6mo ago
I caught that too. What is he getting at? How does the code and infra stack differ at all between a company that is using AI, vs one that is not?
- ghc 6mo ago
  Here's my take on what he was getting at: Build vs. buy is an eternal question in enterprises. I remember many in-house data teams trying to build tools for "digital transformation" and cloud migration about 10 years ago. The challenge was, building those tools was more expensive than those enterprises could budget for (IT as cost center), so a startup like Snowflake would easily outcompete in-house solutions with their custom, cloud-based tech stack that was necessarily complex because it needed to serve the needs of thousands of customers. If he's right, the build vs. buy equation has shifted more towards build, at least as far as enterprise software is concerned. IT is still a cost center, but in theory an internal team can now handle more requests for custom tools without looking to outside vendors. Essentially the cost of building in-house might be collapsing and therefore enterprise software startups will be serving fewer customers (who would all pay you more because if solving the problem was cheap they'd do it). If you had to build a stack for dozens of customers paying huge amounts of money, how would that stack differ from the stack you'd build to serve thousands of customers? Certainly it wouldn't need to be as scalable! And that's probably what he's getting at. I think what you'd do instead, to capture those higher price point customers, is solve their problems more specifically, in a higher value manner. Many companies already do this, investing far more in field engineers than they do in their tech stack, since customization is essential.
  - hyperpape 6mo ago

jumploops 6mo ago

> How can we throw away years of work? This trap has killed many startups, well before AI. Now that code is cheaper to write, hopefully it becomes less of a problem? In either case, founders should never fall in love with their solutions.

grtteee 6mo ago
It’s easier to view it in terms of DCF - the value of a cash flow generating asset = present value of expected cash flows discounted back at a risk discount adjusted rate. In other words what you’ve invested into your existing assets is irrelevant - the cash flows generated by them and the growth assets through future investment, is what matters.

bamazizi 6mo ago

This article resonated with me, especially since I've noticed the fund raising hoopla's in my circle has dramatically dropped. Either investors are tightening the belt so founder-investor fit has crossed into the realm of disillusionment

bluGill 6mo ago
It is the economy. Interest rates are up and that will hit startups first since investors have other options that are more likely to be better.
- tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
  Interest rates hit their peak three years ago and have been falling since. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    They are still up compared to 5 years ago. We also seem to be in a recession (or if not a real recession at least a slow down)

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

jart 6mo ago

If it was stretched before it's definitely snapped now. The only place I see convincing opportunity is resources and commodities.

syngrog66 6mo ago

depends on assumptions. thats the load bearing element. 99.99% of what was true then is still true. its mostly on the fractal churning edges where hyped change happens. things flip-flop too: 2021-2024: good time in US for EV startup 2025: terrible time in US for EV startup 2026 March/April: AWESOME time in world for EV startup focus on fundamentals, not flakey ephemerals 2020: wise to have smart elite software engineers on your team 2021: ditto 2022: ditto 2023: ditto 2024: ditto (is this when ChatGPT launched? dont care. snore) 2025: ditto (what are YC/HN/VC hyping now? snore) 2026: ditto 2027+: ditto, likely

Escafati 6mo ago

One assumption that's also changed: small teams no longer need dedicated QA. Tools like Autonoma (open source, getautonoma.com) use AI agents to generate and run E2E tests in real browsers, and tests self-maintain as your app evolves. One of the things making the solo-founder path more viable.

psychoslave 6mo ago

If you started something at some point, many assumptions are no longer true, and might possibly never have been true at any moment. That said, if you believe universe exists, chances are not null that you are correct. But solipsism might actually be right. In case of doubt, remember that your memory might be mere illusions.

Noaidi 6mo ago

It is insane to me that anyone could look at the US Economy right now and think this was a good time to start a business. Between the war, AI, a pending economic recession (look at bond prices), all I see is failure. Maybe a funeral home, but that is all I can think of.

andai 6mo ago

So previously the bottleneck was production. I'd wager now the bottleneck is willingness to test your hypotheses. The willingness to experience failure as soon as possible. To test and iterate. As technology brings the cost of everything else to 0, psychological costs will predominate. Reality testing is ultimately unavoidable, of course, but I'd guess most people still lean away from that rather than into it. (Our whole culture is set up that way, and most of us get like two decades of Pavlovian conditioning in that direction.) Edit: Expanded here: https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/willingness-to-fail-is-now-a-superpower https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/willingness-to-fail-is-no...

nateburke 6mo ago
Add on the compounding effect that "QA" or "test" in someone's job description was viewed as a synonym for "less-highly compensated" over the past few decades, and you have an entire generation of mid career devs with poorly adapted instincts regarding what is valuable in the process of shipping working product. The bottleneck was never coding...
- canarias_mate 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- petervandijck 6mo ago
  I keep seeing people say that, but the bottleneck really was, to a large degree, writing the code.
  - DontchaKnowit 6mo ago
    Has never been true in my career.
garrickvanburen 6mo ago
I agree, and a willingness to experience failure as soon as possible has always been a competitive advantage. If anything LLM chatbots & synthetic users will make the majority of founders evermore comfortable not testing reality.

wavemode 6mo ago

> https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/UI-vs-AI-Agent.png https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/... The author didn't spend more than, maybe, 30 seconds thinking this through? Information I could've gotten in 3 seconds by opening a screen and looking at a line item, I now have to extract by writing a paragraph to an AI agent (and cross my fingers that nothing I said was ambiguous or misunderstood). And that's supposedly an upgrade?

laughing_abder 6mo ago

[flagged]

vonnik 6mo ago
This smells like LLM.

mbesto 6mo ago

> The bottleneck is no longer engineering. It’s moving up the stack to judgment, customer insight for desired outcomes and distribution. My posit is this: engineering never was the bottleneck, or at least hasn't been for 10 years now. Frameworks and best practices are pretty well known at this point. AI is simply exposing this reality to engineers' faces. Proof point - most publicly traded SaaS first businesses S&M equals their R&D spend, if not dwarfs it. You're going to see this even more lopsided going forward.

amoorthy 6mo ago

"a pricing model based on seats, a product roadmap built around features rather than outcomes [is outdated]" I disagree with this. On pricing, I get that agents and tokens can scale in a way that's unrelated to # of users. But for much SaaS software, AI remains helpful to a human and the human remains the receiver of value. Seat-based pricing is easy to understand and you can always layer in token/agent costs thresholds. On features vs. outcomes, the latter is hard to define and measure in many industries. In marketing SaaS, which I know well, you can't often tell what outcome to expect. You have to try a lot of ideas and some will hit. No way a SaaS vendor can guarantee that.

evanmoran 6mo ago
I’d add that token pricing doesn’t work for anyone but the frontier models. Everything else will be commodified. So Opus can charge us top prices per token until a lower (or local) model hits parity and then price goes to zero.
bensyverson 6mo ago
The argument against seat pricing is that companies will employ fewer people in general. So a 45 person company paying for 10 seats will become a 7 person company paying for one seat. Not sure I agree with this train of thought, but a SaaS CEO made this exact argument to me last week.

ubauba 6mo ago

I think Blank's story is about a guy who missed a $20B market shift in defense VC, not a guy who failed to adopt AI. He's not saying "add AI to your product" or "use AI or die" but more that AI has shifted institutional assumptions about tech stacks, defensibility and fundability. The bottleneck moved up the stack from engineering to judgment, insight and design. Chris lost because he was heads down building while $20B in defense VC was flowing into his exact problem space and he didn't build the boat to capture that wave.

lesostep 6mo ago
>> $20B in defense VC "defense VC budget" seems like a generous way of saying "USA attack budget". Not everyone wants to deal with moral implications of building automation for that.
- ubauba 6mo ago
  Chris might have good reasons to avoid defense. But Blank's point is that he didn't even know the opportunity existed. The issue is not really about a moral choice, more generally it's a situational awareness problem.
  - lesostep 6mo ago
    >> But Blank's point is that he didn't even know the opportunity existed His point is that, true. However, it relies on a big assumption. Blank confidently says that opportunities were missed, and he knows they were missed only because they weren't taken. My counterargument was "Chris could have chosen not to get involved. It's not necessary a lack of awareness on his part"

VladVladikoff 6mo ago

Why not both? When the chat interface fails, you still need a UI to fix things.

dangus 6mo ago

I think this is a lot of fluff supported by a weak anecdote. Chris' company's assumptions are no longer true, but that doesn't apply to everyone's startup. This is mostly a Chris problem. No, not every product can just be a chat window like in the silly little screenshot. If the author actually wrote software they'd realize that, no, AI isn't speeding up development by any more than a modest amount. It's great that we have it and it's removing tedium but it has replaced zero engineers at my company or at any other company of anyone else I know. And no, your company laying off some people isn't because of AI, your startup idea not getting funding is not because of AI, it's because we've been in a regular old recession which is now a developing oil crisis. Interest rates aren't 0% so nobody wants to lend money to infinite startups.

mvkel 6mo ago

Interestingly, this was always true, it's just made more obvious when it takes less time to bring a product to a potential customer. Launching a product was never the finish line; it was always the start line. But technical founders could trick themselves into thinking that building a product was building a business. The same "Lean Startup" rules apply. Build something and get it in front of real people who will pay you for the thing. If they won't, back to the drawing board. The only real "shift" I've seen is that most startups don't actually need VC at all. That's a great thing.

hapless 6mo ago

the best/worst part of this is that it is obviously not written by steve blank. it does not look, read, or track like a steve blank blog piece he obviously generated large parts of this with claude or chatgpt or whatever. i don't know what that means for the rest of us, but boy it's a big ole spike of signal

ajaystream 6mo ago

[dead]

Animats 6mo ago

Note the mention of "systems of record" being unsuitable for the present level of AI. The real question is whether the costs of AI mistakes and hallucinations can be dumped on some external party who can't impose costs on you. If not, there's a problem.

Schlagbohrer 6mo ago

" In the last five years VC Investment in defense startups has gone from zero to $20 billion/year. " Really? No investment in weapons startups 5 years ago? Not even by the CIA-backed VC firms or other SoCal weapons manufacturer networks?

mannyv 6mo ago

'Design for automation.'

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

danish00111 6mo ago

[dead]

aristofun 6mo ago

It’s sad but at the same time reassuring to see more and more of your childhood “heros” revealing their ignorance and lack of wisdom.

elzbardico 6mo ago

> "And if your competitor’s product does the task automatically while yours still waits for a human click, you no longer have a competitive product. The next generation of applications won’t just put information on a screen, they’ll act just like an employee." Oh the joy of unbridled optimism!

touristtam 6mo ago

This blog is borderline unreadable - is there a technical reason this is the case? Or the author isn't able/willing to update his wordpress website?

MrSkelter 6mo ago

Anyone who writes that VC investment in defense was zero five years ago is neither informed nor credible.