Are startups the future of employment?

Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast. This is Ryan Rutan, joined, as always by my friend, the founder, and CEO of startups.com. Will Schroeder Will, this is our last episode of 2025. We're gonna do a little, little December sabbatical. We're gonna take a little break from endlessly talking about all of the things that make founders have all the feels in startup land, and we're going to do it.

On one of the topics that I think has brought out more feels than any other topic in a long time, which is what the hell is AI gonna do to kind of everything. I mean, today, I think specifically we're talking about the fact that AI is going to create a whole bunch more startups. That startups are gonna start popping out everywhere. But because of the future of employment, because employment as we know it. He's about to go away, right?

We're about to see the death of the org chart, so I guess long live the Kanban. I'll tell you what I think what's fascinating is when people see AI coming and they see, Hey, this job's getting displaced and this job's getting displaced, they look at that and they say It's net bad, and I get it. Look, I don't wanna sound for a second. Like I don't have any feelings for the folks that, that are looking down the barrel of a gun right now. It's, it's scary as hell. I've also been here before.

In 1994 when I was running around talking about the Internet's coming, this is exactly how everyone felt. Everyone basically frozen time, 1994. And they said, look, if you sell something on the internet. No one's gonna go into a physical store anymore. By the way, some of that actually did happen. You know it, it Blockbuster was right, correct. Right. They're like, what's gonna happen to Blockbuster? Right. You know, no one's gonna watch movies anymore. Yeah. Actually they are.

And what people always fail to understand at the dawn of a transition is how things look on the other side. All they think about. Yeah. Again, they freeze time and they say everything's is the way it is now. And I'll give you an example. You and I were talking about this. Before the industrial revolution, turn of the century in, in America, nearly 50% of America was in a a greater agricultural society. Right? They're farmers basically. What else would he do?

Machines came around and now less than 2% of our economy are farmers. At the time. At the time, everyone was like, this is gonna be bad for farming, right? Yeah. No, people are gonna eat just fine. We're just about to make a whole bunch of new shit. And, and I think that all of a sudden created far more companies and opportunities and entrepreneurs, et cetera, and that's what we're gonna talk about. Yeah.

Yeah. I think as we, if we look at, at jobs as we know them becoming obsolete, then, then I think we have to look at as saying that, like doing your own thing, be taking entrepreneurial path, becoming a founder starts to become ascendant, right? As, as roles evaporate. Something has to appear to take their place. Right. And I, I hope that, that, that ends up being ownership and that people just have a little bit more agency over, over what they're doing.

Yeah. I, I, I think what's interesting about that is right now, again, this is the equivalent of everybody being farmers, everybody being employees. It's all people know. Yeah, but it's about to go away, like, yeah. Yeah. And I don't want this to sound apocalyptic because this, this is more like, it burns down only for the forest to grow 10 times bigger. It's just when it's burning down, it still feels like it's burning down, right? Yeah. You feel the heat, you feel the heat.

If you look at jobs like a customer service shop, customer service is going away. The job where you get employed to answer emails and answer the phone is not going to exist in five or 10 years. The time horizon does not matter, but I can guarantee you we will look at that as one of the most old school jobs that you could possibly imagine, right? Yeah. Like there was a time when you had to like talk to a person.

It reminds me of when people used to come and pump out, pump your gas at the gas station like the 1950s, right? It sounds like oldie timey. So you go to Europe? Yeah. Yeah. But still holding timing. But I, I think what we're looking at as, as part of this change is the death of big employment.

Yeah, I think the concept and, and what, what I'm calling big employment is going to be these massive employers that had, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of people in some case that hoarded all of the resources. And you could only be Amazon or Walmart or, you know, if you, if you had this level of resource and that's going away. Yeah. I mean, scale used to mean bodies and now it means compute. Right. It's things changed completely. Right?

And so for the folks that you know, the idea was I'm gonna go out into the workforce and those big companies are gonna come and, and employ me and I'm gonna build a career around it. I'm gonna go to college, I'm gonna, you know, get that degree. I'm gonna update my LinkedIn and I'm gonna go work for for big Co. Yeah, that was a path right up until Big Co doesn't have room for you. Right up until the job that you were being groomed for doesn't exist.

Yeah. I was talking to our CTO the other day and I said, if you were 22 years old, right. If you could go back to 22-year-old, you, and I mean, to be fair, he's not that far past that person. That's also true. It's also true. But I said, if you could go back to, to that person now. What career advice would you give them? He's like, I don't even know. And he's like, get some work experience.

I mean, like, I don't know that the job that was supposed to be the, the, the most highly sought after job will even be there anytime soon. Right. It's certainly not in the way that it was. That's a frigging CTO, right? Yeah. Like this is like one of the smartest people know that's top of the stack. Yeah. Top of the food chain being like, huh, well that happened.

I think it's interesting 'cause like I feel like we're at this point now where we're starting to see labor and capital costs drop significantly and, and so we're starting to see moats move away from money, which is what it used to take to start a startup to momentum. Right. Which is a lot easier to gain.

And I think it's an interesting competitive advantage for startup companies because, you know, yes, big, big cos and big employment have a lot of momentum, but it's in a very particular direction. And, and we're starting to see what are they doing to be able to change momentum? They're shedding the headcount. They're necessly, they're, they're doing that. And so the other thing that I think is kind of fun, right? If you can find some fun in all of this.

Is that what was safe is becoming less safe, and what was less safe, meaning the entrepreneurship route is actually becoming more safe. You're gonna have more agency. How crazy. And a lot of those initial barriers have dropped now, right? The things that used to be there that were, were really big and scary and and costly have just kind of gone away.

And so it doesn't have to be a moonshot to work anymore, which I think is, is, is super encouraging as we make this shift away from big employment as that boat, as that ship sinks. Let's look at almost everything that a company has to put money toward that creates their cost basis. And again, remember for folks listening, that cost basis is also a competitive moat for everybody else trying to compete with them because they don't have that investment because they can't afford that cost basis.

They can't afford 500 customer service people, so they can't offer that level of service, right? Until that, that service is just an API that you call that has automated person that picks up the LLM that was trained on your particular business, right? Or pre-trained for your industry. So it already knows all your shit. Like, whoa, okay. That's sort of available to everybody.

Or you look at your marketing staff or your marketing cost, when it used to have a massive number of people to generate unique creative, to be able to manage campaigns, to be able to do all these things, keep eyes on all the data and make sure we're reacting to every little movement, right? Had a person staring at each metric. Unbelievable, right? Like, I mean, it's almost inefficient. In the not use in future. Oh it is, right. It absolutely is. It always was. Right, right.

It just wasn't an alternative. Yep. And so all of the things that contribute to these companies being big companies are all imploding now. Yeah. Again, this is what we said at the top of the show. You start to look at that by saying. Oh, all the jobs are going away, but you're missing the full picture. And we'll get to that, you know, we'll, we'll get to where that starts to change things. But I, I wanna say this, you've now done two things.

You've let a ton of people who are experienced in the market go, okay, you've let in-house lawyers go because you've got AI that can do it. You've got highly competitive markers go. You've got product developers, you've got coders. All these people you've let go, okay, because AI can do the job and you flooded the market. People who really need to get shit done to pay the bills. Okay?

Then on top of that, you have prevented the absorption of all of these new people coming into the job market, right? That are like, Hey, I'm gonna go to college to learn next. And like all the jobs go away. Not quite that apocalyptic, but like, yeah, yeah. But, right, because remember, it's two forces converging As, as one. When Google, lets go of a whole bunch of engineers.

The first place those engineers get reabsorbed is in other companies that still need engineers at the expense of anybody new coming into the market. Right? Right. This happens all the time, you know, during recessions, et cetera. Experienced people basically take the job away from inexperienced people. Yep. We saw this during COVID. A hundred percent. A hundred percent, yep.

And so what ends up happening is, uh, you create this vacuum of lots and lots and lots of people who need to make something happen. That is exactly how companies get started. And sometimes it's fear, sometimes it's greed, sometimes it's both.

But you, we are gonna have an absolute flood of humans all around the world that all need to get shut, something done practically overnight, but to be a whole lot of motivation to start something because there's not gonna be anything for you to just walk into. And that's, so we're hopeful, right? We're hoping that the, the unemployment line turns into the incorporation line, right? So that like people are just. Outta labor and you gotta go somewhere. At some point. You gotta do something.

And so I I this, I mean, again, this is our hope. This is what we hope we see happen. I mean, there's, there's a lot of ways that this could go played out. I'm a 33-year-old computer engineer, right? You know, a developer, right? And I get displaced from whatever, a corporation, because you only need. Fraction of the, of, of the developers to do my job anymore. Okay. And I'm using, I'm using a developer specifically because this is a highly employable person at present.

Yep. I look around for jobs and the problem is every other company, or almost every company is kind of shedding in the same way. Right? Yeah. So it's not only the fact that they're not hiring, they're also flooding the talent or the talent pool With my competition. Yep. The, the people that I, I'm otherwise trying to take their job and they don't even have a job, right? So now it doesn't take me long to realize that me getting reabsorbed into the bloodstream of big corporate ain't gonna happen.

And at the same time, realizing the only way I'm going to get paid is if I control my destiny. Combine that with all the people coming into the market being shit. There's no jobs. In both cases, we create a condition that says, look man, from now on, if you want to eat, you gotta hunt and kill your own stuff, right? Which is how this starts, which is how this starts. The challenges now are around like capability velocity, like what are you able to do and, and how do we, how do we leverage that?

So as we start to see big companies shedding staff, as that starts to stop up the entire works, as you've just described me, that new incumbents, like people, the incumbents are there yet new people coming in. Um, there's nowhere for them to go. I think the way we look at that, uh, in, in part is that yes, that starts to happen at the employment level, but my hope is that at the, at the company level, that the big incumbents don't stop the smaller players from coming in, right.

That this does, that there is room in there to be able to learn, ship iterate faster than those big incumbents. And to take little bits of market share. I mean, for a long time, I mean, basically since the internet started, right? So we go all the way back, like we, we think about how, how things have progressed. You know, we, we went from being agrarian to industrial, to pc, to internet, to ai. Yeah. We moved from muscle to machine, to software to models.

My hope has been really since the beginning of the internet, was that this would allow people with really small ideas, really narrow. Like they just wanna serve like this really specific population. Now all of a sudden they can. They can just go out.

I, I will always go back to this clarity call I had with a guy that wanted to start a, a business to build and ship like, basically like modular, ready to pop up chicken coops. Imagine trying to do that before the internet, before you could reach all the backyard chicken farmers at scale never work, right? Like you, you, how would you find them? All right? But the minute you can aggregate that, that demand globally, well this was just, uh, national in the us.

All of a sudden you've got a business. And so I guess my hope is that we start to see people just attack these really micro niche type businesses and, and be able to grow millions and millions and millions of 'em. And again, I think we're at a really interesting point. AI is both gonna create the need to do this, but the, the cost of tech, the cost of deployment, the cost of customer service, all these things coming down actually allow you to do that, right?

Because you can't build a 60 person company that does what he wanted to do. You can build a two person company, particularly if the tech that you want to build the infrastructure, the email, the, the, the e-commerce, all that stuff costs peanuts compared to what it costs even 10 years ago to do that. And I think, so the, so the conditions are being created on both sides, both the condition, the condition of necessity that we have to go do this.

The conditions that make it possible at the same time, which is, yeah, a lot of hope is coming from right now for me, when the cost of entry, see that's the part that people are missing. They keep, ah, you know, we're losing jobs. Yeah. But we're also bringing down the cost of entry, which by the way, is a huge problem for big companies who survived a very long time because they had the moat of being a big company. Yeah. Here's a great example of watching this in action.

Okay. In, let's say the 1980s, we're not going that far back in the 1980s. There were basically three dominant networks in the United States, right. Uh, television networks. And if you wanted to be on tv, you had, you had a number of time-based slots, you know, from the evening news to, you know, late night with Johnny Carson. Um, and that was it. That was it. That was all that was available. And there was a very small number of companies that controlled that flow.

Okay. Now you fast forward to today, literally anybody can, can have their own show, right? Yeah. My 9-year-old son has a YouTube channel. Okay. The highest paid person in Hollywood is some 20 something year old dude in North Carolina. Mr. Beast. Yeah. Right. Like who's never acted a date in his life. Right. I don't think when, when people see the, the snowball effect here, they really understand these knock on effects. So lemme explain.

Yeah. It's not that Mr. Beast is Mr. Beast, it's number one that there's no longer a gatekeeper to his success. He did nothing special. You know, he's worked his ass off, but like he did nothing unique or special. Right. He's just some random dude that made content. But here's what happened. A whole bunch of other people started to make micro content. They became influencers in all of these categories. Categories you couldn't possibly imagine.

I know like 10 people in the woodworking business, like you know, this very specific niche business that have seven figure incomes off of their YouTube channels, right? Talking about building fucking bird houses, right? So let me build on that. Okay. Here's what happens. A whole bunch of people that see them do it, go, oh, I guess a creator could be a job. It wasn't five minutes ago, but I guess it's now a job. My son thinks he can be a creator. Maybe he can and and he can, right?

I think that's what's so amazing about the whole thing, is that we, we had a couple things come together at the same time, right? Your cost of creation hits near zero marginal costs, right? So curiosity essentially goes infinite, right? Curiosity goes infinite, right? This is why little will can go and be like, Hey, I'm curious. I'm gonna go try this. There's no cost in doing that.

And then on the other side, to your point, the, the gatekeeping around distribution, distribution essentially came, became infinite at the same time. So when creation cost hits zero and distribution becomes unlimited, all of a sudden you have these crazy, crazy conditions. For kind of as many people as want to enter the market with their own specific thing. It can exist, right? It really isn't an upper limit to it. That's only the start.

'cause when, a moment ago when you were saying, Hey, there's, there's all these micro markets, right? Yep. Woodworkers showing you how to build Birdhouse or DIY or a living room or something like that, is a very specific market. Cool. Right? However, there's now huge markets of people who make software for creators. There are now huge markets of agencies that help promote creators, right? Like it's the picks and shovels for miners, right?

Like you, the, the tools that are required to mine the gold. None of this stuff existed like five years ago. Now someone's gonna say, oh no, think there's this one thing. There was teal tequila on my space in, you know, 2007 or like, dude, no, that's uhhuh. That was a glimpse of what's coming. Right. It has nothing to do with where we are today. Yeah. And where we are today is a glimpse of where we're about to be.

This illustrates so beautifully and so visibly where we're headed because when you take two things happen. You took the cost to, to enter, to go to almost zero. You don't have to be NBC anymore. Okay. That's, that's a big deal. Second thing, you took the change in consumption so that anybody could consume it. Anywhere. The moment YouTube was, was viably streaming on a phone. It changed everything, right? It, it changed everything.

When you bring down the cost of consumption, uh, and the cost of production at the same time. Crazy shit. Happens. Yeah. I mean, dude, it's, it's the internet playbook repeating itself in a slightly different way. Unit costs fall, consumption swells, new categories emerge. This is the same thing happening again, and I think we'd all be foolish to think that it all ends in disaster. Or that it's not gonna happen. I think it, it is happening.

No founder worth their salt can overlook how every time there's a seed change like this. Yeah. It creates a hundred x more opportunity than it tears down. Yeah. Again, having lived through the internet, I've been through this chicken little scenario before. Right. It was the Internet's coming. It's the death of all business. Everything's gonna be an e-business and all regular businesses won't exist, number one. Nothing happens that fast. 'cause people are dumb and slow, right?

So like, trust me, I tried, I tried to move people faster and, and it took a long time. But the second part is what we fail to understand is how that new change creates far more, uh, opportunities than there were before. You see. When we have like, like a, let's call it a slower paced society, right? The farming community.

Before we were an industrialized community, industrialized community before we were a computer information tech community, computer industry before, uh, the internet, and of course the internet before ai. What we keep missing is we keep thinking that everything should play by the same rules. It's just fucked up over this new thing. When computers came out, accountants like up, I guess no one's ever gonna need accounting. I guess we're done with accounting.

You know, like I put away the abacus, right? And they fail to understand that it's gonna create so many more companies, right? All of the most profitable companies in the SS and P 500, not all of them, but most of them are companies that didn't exist 10, 20, 30 years ago. Not only did they not exist, they would've been inconceivable 20 or 30 years ago, right? So many things have changed that just like weren't, did, couldn't, couldn't exist. There's entire categories.

There's entire industries based on things that could not have existed even 10 or 15 years ago. Dude, like can you imagine trying to explain social media in the seventies? Yeah. Or the fact, even the fact that you'd have a phone that wasn't connected to your house. A phone. Yeah. I mean, dude, our home screen on our phone is literally a museum of yesterday's Impossible. Yep. Right? Like none of that shit could have happened. Right. You couldn't have had any of that.

And now we literally carry around a bunch of impossibilities in our pocket. Right, and it will continue to repeat and scale. You know, something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done a thousand times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it. But that's okay. That's kind of what we're here to do.

We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all dayLong@groups.startups.com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do, let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it.

So you have two things happening at the same time, and I'm always fascinated by macroeconomics. One is that the cost of consumption, uh, the cost of production rather comes down exponentially. Okay. Um, on so many things, things that you can't even quite wrap your head around. I'll give you an example.

For retailers, uh, traditional retailers, let's, let's say it's a Best Buy or it's, you know, Abercrombie and Fitch, you name it, or somebody doing more traditional retail, their biggest issues and biggest cost centers, that, that drive them insane. Aside from making sure they have the right products, you know, in merchandising our customer service.

It's a hard cost that, that you wanna invest in as little as possible, but not too little because you don't, you don't want the thing to go sideways, right? That goes away. Retailers who work off of a razor thin margin, if you can all of a sudden say, here's 5% of your p and l, that doesn't exist anymore, and you can go reinvest that, they get bigger. Here's the other thing that happens.

How many times are, are you on social media and you see ads for some random clothing company, right, that you've never heard of before? Every time you click, you go straight to a Shopify site. Right? Which, you know, got set up five minutes ago and it's something shipping from China. The cost to be Abercrombie right, has gone to almost frigging zero. You know, it costs people retail fashion.

To design it, to set up your supply chain, to get it out there and sell it to service, the demand, the returns, everything else is just plummeting Lower cost grows the long tail right and and the long tail is exactly where founders feed the creator economies. Is the essence of Long Tail. Yes, Mr. Beast. And you know, there, there's some other folks at the top. There always is. Same with podcasting.

You know, for what we do, there's the Joe Rogans of the world, but for every Joe Rogan, there's a billion people in the long tail. We have some number of people that are really passionate about this topic. Have listened to us for years, and that's awesome, but that's all we need. Like we don't have to be Mr. Beast in order for this to work. It's amazing. And so again, two, two giant forces converging. You've got the cost of of building stuff going down exponentially.

On the other side, you've got the ability to consume because costs are coming down, meaning products come down and there's more products in the market going up. Incredible. Here's an example. This is probably a bad example because it's, it's the biggest, like hard good I can think of, which would be a house if, a house back in the day you had to chop down the, the lumber yourself and, you know, and, and kind of mill it yourself in your backyard. Yeah. Cost 10 years to, took 10 years to build.

Probably not, but let's just pretend you get one house, right? Yeah. Like that's kind of it. And that house is gonna go on to your kids and their kids and their kids. Like, yeah, you certainly weren't thinking of moving every couple years. Absolutely not. You're like, you know, I don't like this neighborhood. Let's go. So it's like, no, dude, like grandpa built this house. We, we don't need a house anymore. And in most countries, that's still the way, by the way.

But a crazy thing happened one day on the job site. A dude showed up with a power saw, right? A circular saw, a chainsaw, whatever, and was like, Hey. I can cut that down faster. Now, initially, the damn lumberjacks and, and craftsmen were like, well, fuck you, right? You just took my job. Now people, you know won't need lumberjacks or craftsmen. Not true. Now you can build fa houses, houses faster, which makes them cheaper, which means more people can buy them.

Now all of a sudden, more people have houses. You know what happens when more people have houses? They need curtains, lawnmowers, furniture, like all of these things. Right, like I call them nodes where you create a new node and that new node expands to lots of other demand categories. Look at your phone right now. Every app on your phone likely represents a company that didn't exist before, right?

10, 20 years ago. But it's likely a billion dollar company. If it made it to your, your phone, Uber when it came out. People are like, oh, it's gonna upset the taxi industry. Uber had 1.5 million people in the state of California alone. This is years ago that they employed in some capacity for a service no one had even conceived a few years prior.

It's all of a sudden when you, when you lower the cost of things, when you introduce new vectors, you get so much more demand, which guess who services demand startups, quite specifically that how these things get created.

I think it's interesting too 'cause as we start to look at things like just price collapse, right? Where do those create an, an opening for premium experiences too, right? So it's, it's not just a race to the bottom in terms of costs, but when we drive costs down on things that weren't actually the important part when we have to pay for things like. Trans global shipping. Yep. Right. As opposed to micro local production.

We're not just driving the price down to zero, we're just creating an, an opportunity to have something way better at the same price. Right. Right. Or to create a premium experience because you don't putting cost and and money into things that didn't actually pass through to the consumer in, in a positive way. So I think there's all kinds of super interesting things that can happen there. And by serving a smaller audience, at least, like theoretically, you can give a lot higher love. Right?

Right. Like if you and I had to respond to the number of people that Joe Rogan responds to, our responses be a lot briefer as it is right now. You and h write about a page and a half to everybody who ever has said hi to us, which means that your net promoter score is up, your retention's up, you know, your average revenue per, per, per user goes up. Yep. All of these things happen, which is net positive, not net negative.

Every one of those startups that gets created, this is the part people are missing, creates infinitely more jobs, which then go on to create infinitely more jobs. Uh, again, that's the part, like Amazon didn't make retail go away. They moved retail to online. I mean, to the extent that they did, Walmart's still around, they're still doing okay, but now they, they have like 1.5 or 1.6 million people that they employ at generally fairly high wages.

You know, uh, warehouse workers now withstanding around jobs that just simply didn't exist before.

Yes. Where this gets interesting is AI is fundamentally a creation engine. That's quite literally what it's generative. It creates new shit. So as founders, our ability to use AI to help us concept new stuff, which you and I do all the time. Right. Then use AI to help us bring it to market. Then use AI to help keep us in market. You know, virtue a marketing and in customer service means so many more people come to the plate.

Now, when a lot more people come to the plate, they're not just gonna do the same exact thing. It's not one person selling lemonade. The next person selling lemonade, the next person selling lemonade, each new person has to say, well, nobody's selling pink lemonade. Well, no one's selling berry lemonade. Well, no one's selling le lemonade with caffeine. No one's selling like right.

All of a sudden the choices get staggering once again, similar to the creator economy, if you look at something like Spotify in what it's done for music, you know, in the same way how before becoming a creator meant you had to get signed by a label, et cetera, Spotify all of a sudden put every song that's ever been made in your pocket for 20 bucks. Do you remember, like back in the day, going to the CD store and you get to pick one artist, right?

In the same way you to only get to pick, pick one video game. Right. And it's like, I can picture this. I remember sitting in those plastic CD racks going through and trying to figure out like, am I gonna get digital underground or Metallica? Because these were two very big choices, uh, you know, in, in that, uh, in that era. And that's all I could get. And so I couldn't take a chance that I was gonna spend my money on anybody that wasn't a proven commodity.

Now, by the way, uh, GP t's connected to Spotify now. So I, I was using it last night and I was having to go through all my music and like, create all new playlists and stuff. And what I told it, I said, give me people I've never heard of before. Give me like, you know exactly what my tastes are. Yeah. It's like, gimme people I've never heard of. Don't worry, you got plenty of those now. Right? Right.

Now think of how many artists I'm about to listen to that I would've never had a mechanism Yeah. To ever find. And now all those people have a new source of income. They're gonna get, you know, some fraction of a penny. But it's, it's more than they would've been paid before.

So, so this is super interesting, and I wanna stick on this for a second because this actually touches on a bit of devil's advocacy that happened in a conversation a few weeks ago where we were just starting to play around with this and say like, okay, and we picked, we picked sports in that case, you, you've just done it with music. But we picked basketball.

And we said, okay, but so if, if things start to fractionalize and there's just a whole bunch of niches, does this mean that essentially, like rather than watch NBA games. And we're just using it as a metaphor. Yeah. Right. Not, not truly like, uh, but are people gonna wanna go watch community basketball instead? Meaning like, as we niche down. Mm-hmm. And we try to create things that are more special as well. Well, okay. But that's not really niching.

That's just going to a. Probably lower quality of, of output. And so we were trying to decide like what that looks like, right? So I think music's a really interesting one. Um, because it's nearly infinite, right? In terms of the, the amount of creativity you can apply, like the number of ways you can combine stuff. There were some other things like sport for example, right?

Like I don't think that just because we could create micro leagues that all of a sudden everybody wants to consume and watch, you know, your neighbor's team play as opposed to the LA Lakers. Let me give you a different version of that.

eSports, right? Yep. Who the fuck saw that coming? Right. Who saw that all the sweaty nerds in the eighties were just hopeful for it? Uh, no. I mean, I was just thinking about this this morning. I've got a younger brother and our best pastime as brothers would be to sit in front of our Commodore 64 computer and play every game like pixel by pixel. Right. Because back then you, you had to relish your game 'cause there wasn't another one after it.

And I just think of all the great times he, he and I had like just scarfing down Doritos, like till four in the morning playing like wastelands. Right. Yeah. No, going deep. Right. But my point is, back then we had very few options for consumption. Yep. And back then, the idea that we'd some someday there would be professionals who do what we do, right. Would seem bananas. Bananas, right? Yeah, absolutely. And now e-gaming is a massive, massive target. For, um, it's, it's incredible.

Like I've had some friends who were invested in that industry saying it's bigger than traditional sports, and I actually just don't believe it. But it might be for all I know from an access distribution, I mean, yeah, I could see, I could see how it could be. Yeah, because you remove the physicality and the, the necessity of.

Some of the stuff that has to happen with, with traditional sport, but, but it goes back to, to what you're saying is like you were thinking about Will, will there be a smaller league of the NFL or something like that? Maybe not. Maybe it'll be a league of something like virtual sports is gonna be a massive, massive industry and so you'll have entire teams of virtual athletes. For games that you can't even fathom right now, the equivalent of Fortnite. Right, right.

For games that you can't even fathom right now, that are gonna be the biggest shows for shows that, that you, that don't even exist, and those are gonna be careers. In addition, there's gonna be a ton of people who service all of those people, right? The people who make the VR headsets, the people who make you know, this Ready Player one style, right? The, the people make the gear, the people who sponsor it, like it creates this whole new economy on top of that.

People who come by and sell the hot dogs and popcorn at your house now because you're no longer at the stadium, right? Like, we'll, we'll find a way. Some founder's gonna do it, so, but okay, some founder's going to do it. So let's bring it back to the, the core here.

The point of all this, and this is, this is like 1994 internet all over again except on steroids. Think of how many founders were born in the era of the internet. I wanna take you back, Ryan, because you know, we grew up at the same time. When I was coming into this market in 94, I was starting, you know, one of the first web design companies. And at the time, no one had ever heard of the internet. No one had ever heard of web design and certainly nobody had ever heard of me.

But more importantly, I had never heard of founders before. Like Michael Dell was a thing back then. Bill Gates was a thing, but they were like total one-offs and nobody really thought much about it. And that was the beginning, the very beginning, the dawn of the young CEO. People don't think about this anymore. 'cause it's like, of course there's young CEOs, mark, you know, not anymore, but there, there wasn't. Right?

Yeah. Like, like good luck finding good, good luck finding A-A-C-E-O without gray hair. Good luck finding a CEO with hair, right? Yeah. Right. Exactly. Right. And so I look at that and I say, man, there was a time when we couldn't even conceive that a 22-year-old could possibly be the CEO of anything. Of anything, right? And within five seconds, they were the CEO of everything. Right now, here's where that gets really interesting.

What really happened is that inspired lots of other 20 something year olds to say, oh shit, that's a thing. Now I can be a CEO. Yeah, I didn't have that benefit. Like I was at the, the dawn of that. So, uh, when I walked into, into a client's office, you know, because I was running an agency, I was a side show to people, they were like, look at him. He still got pimples, right? And I was like, yep, great. Like I couldn't have been more disrespected. I got a lot of dad's suit questions.

Oh yeah, exactly right. Yeah. Shoot the interns here when the CEO e showing up. Oh God. Yep. So, but, but I guess what I'm saying is, but now that's not a thing anymore. What changes is stigma? Okay. A couple things happen. Number one, I think the most important thing is, fuck that guy. If he can do it, I can do it. I think that is such an important argument, right? 'cause it, it drives a lot. The second is this greed of Mr. Beast has a channel, he makes hundreds of millions of dollars.

Dude, I'm gonna create a channel. Yeah, right? In that, that greed to get it done. But the most important is, this is even possible. This is even possible.

Yeah. Wait for the next few years where you see 1, 2, 3 person companies become a hundred million dollar companies. Yep. And we'll see it and all of a sudden people are like, wait, I could do that. With three people. Like I don't have to go raise VC or learn all this business stuff everybody's talking about I'm in, which is exactly what happened in the creator economy. Like everyone said, wait, I can do that. Sure, yeah. Yeah. You can make a makeup channel.

Barriers entry, cost of entry, cost of the equipment, cost of everything. Just went to. As close to zero as as possible. And in many cases, like you just happen to already have it sitting around. Right? You already had a laptop, you already had a phone. Now you have everything you need to have a creator studio. Yep. Cool. I get this great guy that I follow, uh, uh, woodworker. It's called Bourbon Moth Studios. He's just, you know, kind of like this gregarious, woodworker guy. Right.

He's actually very telegenic. But, uh, anyway, he, he has another show that he does that he talks about the production of the show. And he's got like a million followers on YouTube or did years ago, so I'm sure he has more now. He's like, everybody asks me like, you know, what kind of production I'm doing on this thing, like to keep up with and what my teams look looks like. He's like, dude, I have like an $8 app on my phone.

He's like, the whole show is me putting my phone on a tripod, hitting record, and then editing on my phone and hitting upload. He's like, that's it. That is the entire production cycle, right? And, and yet this is his full-time job now. I think what we're going to see with a lot of folks is they realize that what they need is already in their pocket, so to speak. And it's kinda what I said a moment ago. It's gonna be a combination of greed. Like, Hey, screw that guy.

You know, I wanna be able to make that kinda money in fear. Like if I don't do this, I don't really have another choice. Like I need income, so this is what I do. Yep. Yeah. If you get ejected from the cubicle, something's gotta give, right? Because there's a lot of people that are feeling this is like a wave, right? Meaning that there's, there's this thing coming to hit them and it's, it doesn't feel like that to me.

It feels like the sea level is just rising across the board, which yes, comes with some downsides, right? You gotta move to higher ground. But I think that's what we're gonna start to see, right? It, it's gonna force that. Um, but I think we're gonna start to see that and like in, in your mind, what breaks first? Like what, what actually breaks when founders 100 x like education? Regulation funding. Right? Like what actually breaks there?

One of the, one of the challenges, one of the pushbacks that I've gotten to all of this, um, because, and, and like when we were talking about the devil's advocacy before Yeah. I was on the other side of it in the last, I, I can't argue against it. Like I, I know how to argue the fore side. I don't know how to argue against it. Yeah. But in this case, one of the, one of the pieces of pushback was, look, if we start running more and more big businesses, right?

So if you got, you know, uh, three people doing, you know, 150 million or, or $200 million company. What about the people they would've employed before? And, and so are, can everybody do that? Maybe not. Like where does the money come from? Isn't there kind of a zero sum game here? So if it starts getting, you know, if we start collecting more money into less businesses, less employment, who actually buys this stuff? And so a big part of the question is like the order of operations here, right?

So if we start to make, you know, education either way cheaper, way more accessible, or just unnecessary, what breaks, right? What about, you know, things like regulation of, of how these things happen? Does funding break? Do we even need it anymore? Like what are some of the outcomes? What are some of the pitfalls gonna be as we start to see this thing move because it will. Right, and, and where, I guess really what I'm looking for, like the rate limiting factors in your mind.

Yeah. Well, I, I think one of them is the fact that you're gonna have exponentially more companies out there with smaller staffs. If we take ourselves as a microcosms@startups.com, we don't really have a single open hire right now, because if we did, we actually we're not sure what we do with them. And Ryan, you and I were talking about this earlier with the stuff we're about to build next year. The stuff we're about to do for startups.com is like next, next, next level. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, you and I have been around a long time. We've seen nothing like what? What's about to come out and the resources that it would've taken us to do this two years ago, two years ago would be like. 400 people, you know, to get this done right. And so when I think about, uh, like again, this is, this is the germinating effect startups.com. We're gonna work next year and beyond to create so many more startups.

So many more startups, like 10 x, the number of startups we're gonna take, the costs of starting down to near zero. So we're talking like legal incorporation, like all that boring stuff. But more importantly, the stuff you spend more money on, like branding and logo development and marketing and funding and like all this stuff.

We're gonna make it so much faster, cost damn near zero, and do so many things for you that even if you just have a a shitty idea, we'll be able to build a real business out of it for you in a short period of time. Yeah. Now I say this to say, think of how many new businesses we're going to help create. Like I, it blows my mind to think of the net impact of what we're about to do, but it also blows my mind to think that we need so few resources to make that change. That's the crazy part.

Right. And I think that that, and that carries over, right? So then there's, there's a long tail to that as well, which is as we start to lower the cost of failure, we raise the rate of tries. Correct. And so all of a sudden you're gonna see this exponential increase in, in the number of people who are building that just because, not just outta necessity, but I think outta desire, I think. Right. I think at some point people are gonna look at this and go like, okay, so.

I used to look at entrepreneurs and go, man, I like a lot of what they've got there. Like, I like the idea that there's some time freedom. I like the idea that they're working on shit they really care about. I like the idea that they get to pick who sits next to them in the tank, all that stuff. Yeah. But I don't like the fact that like it meant going a couple years without income. I don't like absolutely idea that the income could just go, I don't like the idea. Right.

So there's all of these other pieces that I think that because so much of the, that failure cost. We're tied up in things that just don't cost anything anymore or are more easily avoided because we have visibility. We can validate, we can do all these other things that used to just have to come by, build it first, and then push it out and then see what happens when it, when the weather hits it. We can simulate all that.

Now we can move so much faster and so much further with very little risk and cost. I think the biggest thing that I'm seeing right now in, in the startup market that's changing the fastest is certainty. Which is kind of cool at a time where pretty much everybody is scared shitless because of the uncertainty about what's gonna happen. Right? Right. I'm actually seeing a rise in, in the certainty of what you can now go and do as a founder.

Which I think is gonna empower a hell of a lot of people, do a hell of a lot of cool stuff.

Let's build on that because I think one of the major shifts you're going to see that come out of this is the greatest rise in entrepreneurship that we have ever seen on a global level. I think the global level's the important one because up until now, even for, for as much as things were go-go from the nineties till about now with entrepreneurship.

This is of course a very American view, but I've, I believe that most of that came from the US and maybe it didn't, but that's, that's how I saw it, because I've been here. Sure. I think there was a bit of a moat that got created. We see this all the time with founders that come to us looking to raise money. They're like, Hey, uh, startups.com. You know, can you guys help me understand how to raise money? But I'm in Bangladesh like. Probably not right?

And not really, but like it's gonna be exponentially harder. Or you're coming from Africa or you're coming from Australia, you're coming from, and again, I'm not saying you can't do it, I'm saying the cost and time to do it is a lot higher. Okay. But what if you didn't need that money to begin with? What if the very thing that was preventing you from getting started just goes away? Right? That's where it gets really interesting. I'm gonna go back to the the creator analogy.

Five or 5, 10, 20 years ago, you needed to have a production studio and a bunch of people in distribution and, and, uh, relationships with networks, et cetera, in order to get your show distributed. And now you can, like, like my, my bourbon moth woodworking guy just recorded on your thing and, and have a million people following you. There's just no, uh, barrier. Well, now a lot of people can start. My son got started, right? He's got his channel. He has exactly nine subscribers so far.

We refuse to tell anybody what the channel is. That might be part of it, but the idea is he has, it took him five seconds to get started. Now, here's the other side in his cost of failure is very low. Now it's a bit of a straw man argument for a 9-year-old because he has no. Consequence of failure.

But what I started to see with Shopify stores, uh, with how quickly you could get, get up and running as a retailer with Etsy stores, how quickly you could get up and running, uh, as an individual with gig economy work. You know, whether it was Instacart to Uber, et cetera, Upwork, for that matter, how quickly you could get engaged and start making money from your services directly.

All of those things are the equivalent of what's about to happen, except now all of those things are gonna be people starting their own stuff. I mean, you could, you could argue that, uh, an Etsy seller is by all means a small business, right? And so I think you're going to see so many more people offer their thing, right? Whereas maybe, maybe you worked in a team of a hundred accountants doing accounting, you're now a team of three accountants doing accounting.

You're doing the same stuff, you're still doing counting, you're probably using different tools, but it's with a smaller team. I think instead of startups, you no longer need like pooled resources, pooled assets to have a competitive advantage or to have, even to be able to be at a cost where you can afford to deliver at, at any level. Yep. Right. And I think once that goes away, then it, it just opens so many doors. Because again, to your point, like imagine just go, go back again.

15, 20 years woodwork guy. Guy couldn't have produced that show. Not only would there have been nowhere to distribute it, it was Bob Villa for 40 years. That was it. Bob Villa for 40 years. Right, because he got one of those coveted network slots, right? Yep. He got, he got the distribution side and he had an entire production team. Imagine what a single episode of that cost versus imagine the cost that it's, it's woodworking guy's time and nothing more, right? An $8 app.

If, if I think we, if we zoom out and we say, this isn't a matter, none of this is a matter of when it's going to happen, like. Pretty soon. Yeah. Yeah. It's a matter of how big this thing gets and how transformative it becomes, I think for a lot of founders where they're like, ah, it is bullshit again, again, I think that argument's harder and harder to, to stick behind, and it's a losing argument. Like if, if you think AI bad, you know, I, I wanna stay away from it. I wanna avoid it.

I. Dude, I've been through this. I watched it happen when the computer stuff happened. I watched it happen when the internet stuff happened. Right. You lose every time. Right? Yeah. It, it's, you don't wanna be on the wrong side of this argument. I, I, I buy all of the arguments of what AI can do wrong. I agree with all of them. Right. Yeah. And you don't want to be on the, uh, the wrong side of this. Our right side@startups.com is we're gonna build the engine that builds millions of engines.

You know, we're gonna build the engine that makes it easier than it's ever been to start a company, to scale a company, to operate a company, uh, so that more founders, uh, don't need capital. Right. You know, certainly not in the same way. No one's gonna miss kissing the asses of, of venture capitalists. I'm sure they'll find other people to, to throw money at. We're gonna create an environment where people with just. A decent idea. It doesn't have to be big idea.

It could be, it could be, Hey, I'm gonna have the raspberry lemonade. Right. I'm gonna mix two lemonades. Right. And that's the idea. It's enough. Just like the creator company, there's a market for that. Right. And that's exciting to me. I, I think, you know, for a lot of people that opens up doors that never existed before, especially in, in developing countries, which would've never had this opportunity. Play it out.

I mean, like, think about what funding, when, when funding becomes optional, right? Mm-hmm. Then think about what ends up happening when revenue is greater than debt, which is greater than equity, and we can avoid, avoid dilution completely before we, we hit product market fit even. Yep. Right? Imagine what happens. Imagine what happens because again, like we, we avoid some of these scenarios where we see what otherwise would've been great businesses.

They get to a point where they've taken on venture capital, they get to that mid-level income, right? They're, they're now mid-sized revenue company. They can't make distributions to themselves or the team. They can't do anything they want to with their cash. Why? Because that won't pay back vc. They've gotta grow. They got three outcomes. We can IPO. We can get acquired or we can, uh, take on another round of liquidity and take another rent and create liquidity, right?

So all of a sudden you have all these other options that just stay on the table, which is a huge part of de-risking it, right? If you could have even gotten the funding in the first place that applies, that applies, you could have gotten in the first place, which most people just won't. Statistically, they won't, right? We take that off the table, all of a sudden, that's just one. That's just one vector, and just the, the, you know, the cash reductions.

We've talked about this in other, other episodes. You've touched on it today. But as we reduce the need, right, when we no longer need to build a massive moat with people, you know, to do the marketing, a massive moat of people to build the technology, a bunch of cash to pay all those folks, all of a sudden we don't have to think as big to achieve success. So we can actually aim small absolutely. And achieve something really cool. That's a big deal for an awful lot of people.

Yeah, and I think, I think what people are missing right now is they think that we're in the age of ai, and I understand that, right. A AI is pervading everything in the same way we thought we're the age of the internet. But AI is just a tool. The the reason it becomes meaningful, like what it creates in the world comes from founders, it comes from startups. Yep. What we're about to be in is the age of the startup.

Every single person has a meaningful shot to create a startup, their own dream, their own product, their own market in a way that we've never seen at a scale that we've never seen before. And I gotta tell you, as somebody, and I know you share this with me, Ryan, as someone who helps startups for a living and believes so strongly in founders, I feel like you and I have been waiting for this age for our entire life. Overthinking your startup because you're going it alone.

You don't have to, and honestly, you shouldn't because instead, you can learn directly from peers who've been in your shoes. Connect with bootstrap founders and the advisors helping them win in the startups.com community. Check out the startups.com community@www.startups.com to see if it's for you. Could be just the thing you need. I hope to see you inside.