Can Founders be Replaced by AI?

Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast. This is Ryan Rutan joint, as always by my friend, the founder, and CEO of startups.com. Will Schroeder, will AI is now writing our copy, debugging our code, AB testing our pricing while we sleep, to the extent that we do. So the existential questions getting pretty loud and clear. If the smartest person in the room now costs 49 bucks a month, what's left for founders?

So I think, man, it'd be fun today to break down like what parts of us get automated and which parts become more valuable than ever. The

question a lot of people are saying is, can AI replace a founder? Yeah. And, and I, I'm gonna be heretical when I say this. Yes. Now I say that as a founder, as somebody who does not want to be replaced, right? Yeah. So I wanna be clearly, I, I have a strong bias to say, no, this is where we fight back against Skynet will. It kind of is, we know how this goes. It doesn't end well for us. Although we do get a a, a cool Austrian sent back to it to help us. You sure do.

So here, here's what I would say. When I say yes, I don't mean, uh, universally all of us, I'm saying Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of, I think what historically I considered my founder traits. Um, my ability to work really hard on all these different things, those things just aren't hard anymore. Right. Like, I'll give you an example.

I've prided myself for a very long time on being a strong writer. You've seen me write unlimited amounts of copy, right? Yep. And it was like we could just take any topic, uh, whether it's landing page copy, or educational copy, or your newsletters, and you're like, we'll, write something. And I would just, right? Yep. And, and like I said in, and my writing was decent and it was passable. Yeah. But now. AI can write as well, if not better than I can. And it's almost like that skill.

Okay. This is just one example kind of went away. Now the, the importance of having something to say has not gone away here. Right, right. What you're trying, trying to say part very much I. But your ability to convey that in words is no longer a unique skill that some people have and some people don't. Some people, of course, are gonna be better at it,

but no, if, if chat GBT can crank out 50 landing page variants before lunch, then we can't treat the copywriting piece as the founder superpower, right? Knowing what to say, important. Saying it less. So I wanna dig into that just a little bit more. 'cause I, this is just so fascinating to me that this whole, this whole era right now is so fascinating to me.

Right now we're at a point where AI, and, and I, I would argue, I always use the, the corollary to, uh, gaming machines from Atari 2,600 Yeah. To like, you know, uh, current Xbox, so to speak. And I, and I would say AI is still in roughly somewhere between the Atari 2,600 and the in television stage, right. Just like the Right, the very early stages. And at the time people never see it that way.

Like, like when you had your Atari 2,600, you thought it was the most amazing gaming system that it e ever existed. Well, it was because it was right. 'cause right before that I had pong, and right before that I had just tic-tac toe on a piece of paper. You bet, you bet. So I say this to say there are many, many, um, iterations that are coming, but even in the current iteration, at the most basic. What AI can do now, it makes a lot of the stuff we were spending so much time doing.

Kind of irrelevant or at worse. Yeah, man. Duplicative. Yeah. Yeah. Anything that's repeatable, data-driven, pattern based. To me, man, that's already AI turf. Right. And as you said, we're just at the beginning stages. And here's another way to look at it.

I used to run a large ad agency, right? Yeah. And we had hundreds and hundreds of people, uh, copywriters and creative directors. Yeah. You know, and all these folks, right. And the copywriters, for example, of which I had a, a strong affinity for, would be able to sit in a room and we'd be working on a campaign, and they'd come up with dozens and dozens of different ideas and approaches. Right now, within that contingent of copywriters.

Like anything else, like athletes or anything else like that? There were a few that were exceptional. Let's say the A players. Yep. And there were a handful that were B players and a lot of people that were C players. Okay. Yeah. Now what I would argue is most AI can perform about as well as the B players and most certainly the C players. Yes. Yeah, I agree. Are they replicating the A players? No. And they, they may never. May never. Okay. However, that's here nor there.

The point is, if I can now have copywriting and and idea generation done at a B level. Yeah, for $0 for $49 a month, right? Yep. Why wouldn't I be doing that? Exactly. No. The accelerative power, that is insanity. Right? And this is, this is what we should all want, right? This is what we all want. Correct. We've always wanted this. We're like, how could I just get them to produce way more? Right? I can only afford one person. How can I turn them into 10? Here's your answer. And again,

we're focusing this episode inward to say, and what if I wanna be the force multiplier? Here's a, a great way for me to, to, to show the difference. Uh, a few years ago when I was writing copy for something, I kind of knew what my rate of output would be, and I knew that, let's say I'm just making this up on, in any one day, I could create, uh, you know, a five page document, just, you know, using it as a unit of measure. Okay, well now in a day I can create 10, five page documents.

Yes. Right. So because the AI can basically take the ideas from my head and just put all the words that was like me manually lay laying bricks before, right? Yeah, exactly. And I just don't have to do that. No. So part of me would say, man, that felt very special to me. You know, I felt very unique that I had that capability. Uh, and, and, and that's been quote taken away from me, but there's another side to say, but was that really was my ability to, to, to write words and compose the value?

Or was it the idea behind those words? Yeah, I mean that was the thought. The always was the idea. We just didn't have another way of manifesting the idea in the past. Right. There was have idea. Now put it to paper. Right. We just don't have to do all of the manual work for that. It's funny, man. I had this realization the other day that there are tasks that I think once were like the signals of my genius, that now would just be a signal that I lost my open AI password. Like nothing else.

Like if you see me doing them, you're like, wait, where I did the power off? Like what are you doing? And again, like to your point, like things that used to seem really, really important to me, like digging through analytics and pattern spotting, right? Right. Seeing things other people couldn't see. I'm good at that. Yeah. I'm nowhere near as good at that as a machine that can crunch through millions of records of data in minutes. Um, just not, so

I think this is the first building block of this conversation. I think let's first explore what should be replaceable. Right. So I know everyone has this, this I immediate reaction and it's visceral to say, I can't be replaced by machine, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, dude, you can, right? Yeah. And you will be. So let's talk about why you should be and what you do about it. Right.

Sure. Not just like this, this natural tendency to just push back and just be like angry about it that buys you nothing. Yep. And there is a very, very, very long list of tombstones of people that had exactly that reaction and didn't work out well, particularly in the business world.

So again, Ryan, when you think about things that are replaceable, that should be replaceable, that like, while, like you just mentioned analytics, that a moment ago you were like, Hey, this is what I got paid to do, and now it's like it's a $49 a month, uh, problem. Yep. What else comes to mind? It's the, the time consuming part of it.

You can just look at it from a, a pure time calculus perspective, like, and replace the things that are gonna take you the most time and still, like, they're valuable. They, they need to be done, but they don't need to be done by you. You know, as we were coming into this episode today, will, I was, I was thinking about the process you've gone through with building the house. Mm-hmm. Right.

And it occurred to me like, you know, you at the beginning, like you could have treated yourself as the architect, the GC. The plumber, the electrician, the framing guys. Right. All of it. Right. You could've just done all of it and you've done, you've done a lot of stuff, but at some point, like it makes a lot more sense for you to hire a GC and a plumber and electrician and all of that. Right?

Right. Well, I think that, you know, we were once as founders, we were once the architect, GC plumber, all of it. Like we just had to do everything. We got so used to, especially at the time you and I came up through this. Yeah. We had to do everything. There wasn't anybody else to do it. You really did. Yep. There weren't tools to do stuff. We did a little of everything now. AI steps in as the GC and AI just hired the plumber. Yep. Now you can just stay in the architect's chair.

Right. That's the way I see it. So what, what I'm looking at is like, how can I just stay a above that kind of messy work layer in a way that doesn't keep me uninformed, but doesn't have me overworked in the sense that like I could be doing more valuable stuff. So instead of having to crunch all the analytics like I used to. I can get the insight from that and I can spend more time deciding what to do based on that insight. Right, right, right.

So the, the, the base level analysis, all of those kind of things just going away, anything that requires like mass creation or mass ingestion and kind of normalizing of information just gonna go away. Right. So at the marketing level, looking at across, like, you know, if we're honest with ourselves, we talk about AB testing and, and you know, optimization and all this stuff that we, that we do. Yet, it's sort of done on kind of like a rolling window basis.

Mm-hmm. Do I look all the way back to the very first experiments I ran on Facebook ever. When I'm, yeah. When I'm running, running the ones now, yeah. I can't, I can't look at 6,000 ads. AI can, so now it allows me to do these things better. And it was never about the analysis before. It was about getting to the answer and then acting on the answer. Right. And I still think that the acting on the answer piece is still very much. In founder camp. We'll see for how long?

I think a big part of where the pushback is, is there's an overwhelming focus, justifiably so right now around what AI is taking away from us. There's not enough of the conversation, and I think the smart founders are already pointing this direction around what it is enabling us to do. Not that nobody's ever mentioned what, what AI can do. Yeah. What I'm saying is as founders, as founders, there has to be a version of us that says, dude, like. I'm about to be Superman. Right.

Yeah. Like for example, when I was first starting in my career, I didn't understand anything about finance. I mean, not even a little bit. And as you know, I've been a startup CFO for 25 years in addition to my, my day job. And it's not because I'm a financial wizard, it's because as soon as you put dollar signs in front of those numbers and you said, Hey, that's your money. Yeah. All of a sudden I was like the, the rainman of finance, right? Like I was just like, I, I understood it. All right?

The matrix, it all made sense. But think of how under. Armed. I was at that time, right? He here, here's how I figured out finance. I drove to Barnes and Noble. I found a book that was probably published 15 years prior on small business finance. And I read it cover to cover, which took days, right? Yes. And it was the driest, most boring book ever. However, changed my life.

But think of all the things that that had to happen in order for me to be able to do this one simple thing, which was put together an income statement, right? Yeah. Yeah. Now I can do that like a seasoned pro without even knowing how to do it.

I just, I have to go back to this anecdote where, where you talked about, where you were asked for the income statement and you, you pulled out the, uh, you pulled the piece of paper outta your pocket that just had like the monthly, like the things you had spent money on that month and like showed the investor. I love that man. This, that was, that was, this is the moment where that education became obvious and necessary to you. That would've been really useful at that time.

Hey, what's your pro forma income statement? My, my what? My what? My, um, here's a list of things I'm gonna buy at the store later. That the team, yes. I literally gave a, a word document of, of how much I owed my roommate that month. Yeah. But again, you know, plan it out a little bit. So we keep talking about the things that's taking away from us. But when I say, you know, some of these traits, you know, are replaceable, I'm saying not only are they replaceable, we should lean into that.

Yeah, right. A hundred percent. My first reaction being AI is taking away my uniqueness of being a copywriter. Okay, got it. Okay. But how can AI also make me 10 x the copywriter? Right. Yeah. If, if, if I have so much to say, how can I say it exponentially faster, more efficiently, et cetera. Like, I've got an AI that's trained on my voice so I can tell it anything I want and it will respond in my voice. Now I don't love it. Right. I don't love it.

So, so like, uh, when I used a brainstorm stuff, it'll come back in my voice, but it's, as you know, AI has a smell to it. Yeah. Yeah. So, so it's always like the, the kind of. AI version of my voice. Yeah, it's 80%, but it ain't a hundred percent. You mean auditory voice? You're not saying write something in your voice and tone, you mean? Oh yeah. Your actual voice point. Good point. Actually, the auditory voice is spot on.

No, in this case, I mean the, uh, the, the, the writing and, and I gotta say, man, uh, what I get back if I published it as is, no one would know the difference. I'm the only person that can tell the difference in this case, but I can tell anyway. Maybe you just don't like your writing will maybe that I, I I always used to make the joke that if we ever come up with an AI that can replicate yourself, that will be the most hated person of all time. Oh, yeah.

Or, or AI hang out with yourself all day long. Oh, how about this? God. An AI that is purely based on your search history. Yes. That person, the worst human of all time. Oh God, I hate that person. Anyway, I think that again, we're having that first initial reaction that says, you know, AI pad, blah, blah, blah. Um, we might wanna look at it going. Should you have had to know all of finance in order to advance your business.

Yep. And there's gonna be some argument where someone says Yes, but that knowledge and what you went through Uhhuh, you know, taught you to do X, Y, Z, and, and there's some truth to that. Sure. But dude, that is a really painful, hard way to me, like 10 years to do it. Right. I needed that information day one, not 10 years from now. This is here, here's, this is a big question. I don't think anybody can answer this just yet, but one of the questions is.

How will this be different for people who didn't come up, who didn't have those hard lessons? So if you're just born now Yeah. And you, you just grow up an AI native. Yeah. You just have always had this stuff at hand. You're always using it. How does that change your ability to use it to see the difference between the, the, the good, the bad. To know that difference? Like you talked before about it A level, B level, C level.

Yep. If you've never worked with a bunch of copywriters and seen a, B and C level copy. How will you know when AI's actually doing the right thing? Right. You won't. I, I, I actually just went through this, right.

You know, as I'm designing my house, I use a tool called SketchUp, you know, which I put in the 3D model Within that I have to, I built all the cabinetry in the house and all the, the closets and everything. Yeah. And I had to build drawers, you know, for, for every one of those. Well, in order to go into SketchUp and create what, what amounted to 88 drawers to size them, create the 3D geometry and whatever, and get 'em all set up, would've taken forever.

Okay, so this is a perfect example of me coming from a space that I'm not in and being able to do something. There's no way I would've ever been able to do. I go to GPT and I said, here's a list of all the drawers that I need, just like the, the widths and the, uh, depths. I said, make me ruby code, right? That I can import into SketchUp. That will automatically create all of the drawers that would, that would fit for these dimensions.

Give them a, a notch and a data and you know, all this stuff, and create all the geometry, the full model. Right. Five seconds now. Okay. Nuts, dude. Unbelievable, right? Yeah. Would've taken me a week. Okay. Yeah, and I've got, I would've gotten it wrong. Now, a couple things. Number one, 99% chance, there's something in there that's wrong. There's a drawer with eight sides to it or something like that. Yeah. GT's. Just not very accurate. So it helps to know what you're looking for.

But here's my point. This is the same with with finance. What it would've taken me. To perform the same operation. Yeah. To learn Ruby code, right? Yeah. To recheck all of my math, to be able to sit and see, I mean, like it would've taken me, uh, forget the Ruby Code. It would take me a week to do it manually. Right? Yeah. And longer to learn Ruby Code. And someone might say, yeah, but then you'd know Ruby Code and here's what I would say. Cool. I may never need that again. Right.

I just needed to do that one thing. All my action script and cold fusion knowledge is getting used. Not at all at this point, right. I'm just say love that stuff. Like I don't necessarily, like, I get learning things and again, I, I love learning things. So they we're in a platform where we teach people stuff, but not everything a founder needs to do. They need to be the educated expert in all the eccentricities of that. It doesn't matter if you know a, B or C grade copy, you just need copy.

Yeah. And if it doesn't sound like total shit, it's gonna work. It's gonna be a good starting point. At least you can always adjust it. Yeah. 'cause the reality is we're not gonna know whether it's good copy or not until it faces some other humans. Mm-hmm. Or maybe some AI and gets picked up and search results and whatnot. Right, right. Yeah. So, you know, from my standpoint, I look at all of these things that I can now do. That I couldn't do five minutes ago.

Okay. Yeah. So for example, the big thing now is people can write code.

Yeah. Right? Which is, so, I mean, Ryan, you and I have haven't written a line of code in 20 years, right? Our knowledge is so far from useful at this point, but now I can write code in any language for any purpose I can get MVPs put together, et cetera. How is that not a force multiplier? The time it takes me to create a landing page now. Right now, not a read to chip, right? It's gotta go over to Dev and they gotta do their stuff track.

But the time it takes me to create a landing page now is less than the time it would've taken me to go through the drawer to find the pencil to do the sketch on paper. Right? It's bananas. How much faster we can move and how we can get onto like the important parts, right? Because the important part wasn't drafting the wire frame. The important part is getting that page launched.

Getting traffic point of that page and starting to then have AI analyze the results and tell me what still needs to be changed. Fantastic. Right? This is what you want. It's short circuits, so many tedious processes. The number of hard choices I have to make now. Are so significantly lower because it's like, well, I can do this, or I could do that, or I could do that, or I could do that one. What are we gonna get to this week? All we'll just do, just yes is the answer.

Now, I love being able to just say, yes, come on, why not? Right? Like, oh my God, in, in my getting customers workshops on Mondays and Fridays. The number of requests I can now field people that need help with really heavy lifting stuff were honestly, most of the lifting was on their part, but I still had to show 'em how to do it. Yep. This is part of where I'm just like automating and, and AIing like crazy.

Like what am I asking founders to do over and over and over again That not only are they resistant to, but I know they desperately need. Cool. Let's AI the shit outta that because having something done is better than having nothing done. Right. And in a lot of cases it's just motivating them to do more of sometimes the manual work, but it shows them the power of what that thing is. If, if anything, it just serves like a little simulation.

IP, or like, you know, I'm a huge fan of the Mom test, right? Yeah. Love that book. Please go buy the book. Rob Fitzpatrick did a great job with it. But the process of going through that, for a lot of founders, they're like, I'm just not gonna go do that, or I'm not gonna go do it.

Right? It's me going to Barnes Noble and buying that book. Right? It them, yeah, yeah, yeah. I simulate it for them in 15 minutes. Then they're like, oh, that's what this tells me. Yeah, that's what this tells you now, right? You can trust this to a degree 'cause it's based on the average of the internet. It'll get most of it right? But you should also pick up the phone and talk to a couple of your, your, your people and get the actual answers.

And it's been a great motivational factor, which is awesome.

So if. Like, and, and here's the thing, every time I do that, there isn't a founder going, but Ryan, aren't you replacing a part of me? Yeah, a part of me that you didn't want to exist in the first place. Right? Alright. Right. Nobody's upset about it. Nobody. They're all like, great. I can get onto the part where we turn that into useful information to sell people stuff.

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. As a carpenter myself, uh, whenever I'm, you know, building a house, I think to myself, there's no carpenter ever that's thinking to themselves. I'm so pissed off that you gave me a, a powered circular saw. My hand saw was so much better. Yeah. Dick, come on. Yeah. Just rubbing my head without blisters on my hands just doesn't feel the same.

Yeah. You know, like, need those calluses. All right. So we've definitely said yes.

There's tons of stuff that can be replaced, right? Yeah. And, and we're almost saying, and should be. Right. Like, like do not resist. In this case, a lot of the stuff, not everything, and we're about to go the other direction, a lot of this stuff should be replaced. We should embrace the replacing like we're shedding skin because the world just got way easier for us. Yeah. But let's talk about the other side. You know, we said the, the topic of this is can AI replace founders?

But let's talk about the other side. What makes us unique? What is AI not likely to replace? And I wanna caveat this by saying there is a sci-fi version of everything. Where you could say and make an argument, and I'm one of the people that can make this argument that would say, no matter how hard you try to say that humans are always going to be unique. We are an algorithm, and algorithms can be replicated. Right?

So I, I wanna be clear when I say this, we're not, Ryan and I aren't sitting here being like humanity is, you know, irreplaceable in any way. That like, we, we recognize that at some extreme level there's probably an AI that, that can do some things, but at a practical level, at a level that actually makes sense for, for either now or in, in the very near future. I don't believe that AI can do some really human things. Sure. And I don't believe it should.

I think, you know, if, if we're saying AI can create music, but should it, right? Yeah. Yes. It can create something Right. But the point of music wasn't to make the music. It was a form of expression, which usually comes from a place of need to express Right. AI will never need to express itself. Correct. It doesn't take anything away from that. Correct. Right. And I think now there's something really fascinating about how we get to use our uniqueness.

Let's say again, I'm gonna go back to me as a writer, imagine for a second. There are two components of me being a writer. The part where I can generate a unique thought that people might give a shit about, and the part where I can translate that to words that people might wanna read. Yeah. Okay. The latter has been mostly replaced, right? Yeah. Just about any thought I have can be translated to words that are 90% of what I would've used anyway. Okay. As weird as that is, it's It's true.

But the unique thought. This, this unique idea, this, this, this unique opinion, et cetera. AI can come up with variants. They can't come up with my variant necessarily. Right? So what happens is my voice now, I mean my voice vis-a-vis the work that I do, the things that I produce in life, et cetera, becomes force multiplied. Yeah. If before I could, my opinion could generate one article, now my opinions can generate 50. Right now they can generate a goddamn movie in the not to distant future.

That is amazing. But in order for all that to happen, the uniqueness has to be me having something to say. Yeah. It starts with that, right? Like the, the things that it's, you know, the, the key to differentiators at this point are, you know, like vision, narrative, human urgency, moral compass, like these things can't be replaced yet. Humor still not particularly good at that.

Right. Um, but I wonder to some degree, like you said, that like, it can't come with my thought, but. Part of that, how, how much of that is, is the way that we use it right now? Mm-hmm. Right Now, I have tested this a little bit. I played around with like, instead of saying, here's what I think, right? The rest of this, it's sort of like, here's the thing that happened. What do you think my reaction to this is? Right. It's interesting.

It's really interesting and, and basically like, what do I think about this? What do you think I think about this based on what you know about me? What do you think? I think because we've both given AI plenty of information about ourselves, and certainly it learns all the time as we're, as we're utilizing it, but to your point, it comes up with some, some possibilities. I, I would say it's still. Generally not close.

But then I wonder like how much of that is my own bias saying that's not exactly what I would've thought about that. Or, well, when I thought about it already, that's not what I thought about it. But how about this? What if we were taking this a step further and we're to say, what matters now is what you want. Not what the AI might respond to mm-hmm. But what you specifically want. In other words, I can go into an AI right now and I can say, give me ideas for what startups might want.

Okay. And it'll, it'll come up with tons of ideas. And, and I would say it'll come up with probably 75% of the ideas that I would've come up with. Right. Just enough darts at a wall. Right. Like, uh, you know, whatever. But the, and, and, and one of them might've matched what I was gonna say. That's perfectly fine. Right. But the point is, I'm the curator. I'm the one that says, no, not that. Yes, that. No, not that. Yes, that. My vision, what I want is what matters. That goes back to music.

Yes, AI can create some version of music, but the composer is what matters. The composer decides right. Is that what they want? Right. It's not like, uh, I'm a composer. The AI creates a song and I'm like, I hate it, but I have to have it anyway. Right. The whole point is, yeah, we are, we are the final decision.

We, you know, we are, to your point earlier, the architect of all of this we're the one that our curatorial ability to be able to say, yes, this, yes, this, yes, this, whether it's people, product, marketing, copy, et cetera, is what makes us unique.

Yeah, I mean at this point, like go back to some of our other analogies, like AI can draft all the blueprints, but like it can't convince the city to build the skyline, can't it? Right. Like Right. Or just have the vision to why you'd wanna do it to begin with. Right. What I'm saying is what makes us unique is this curatorial vision. What doesn't make us unique is laying all the bricks to do it anymore. No, I know.

So again, going back to to, to my, my place in the world as a writer, which I've given a lot of thought to. What makes me unique is the fact that I have a lot of unique ideas. Right, or just, or unique to me, whether anybody else has thought 'em before, who cares, right? Unique to me. But now I no longer have the time element, the writer's block element, et cetera, that prevents me from expressing them. Right.

So whereas before, you know, I read a, a weekly newsletter that you, that we published, that we, that we do this podcast based on before, I'm like, okay, it takes me x amount of time to take whatever unique idea I had. Like, can I replace founders and convert that into, uh, copy. Now it still takes me roughly the same amount of time, uh, because I like to play with the idea. I like to wrestle with the idea. It's not like I'm just trying to write a, a newsletter.

Like I try to, like, I, it's very cathartic for me, but ultimately. It's my idea, right? Uh, you know, that I'm breaking AI can gimme 50 variants of, of how AI would talk about it, but I'm still the curator. I'm still the one to say, yes, this, no that, yes, this, no, that it's my job. And this is, this is a metaphor for building a startup. It's still my job to orchestrate all of this. Well, it always was, right?

It's, it's funny to me that we don't think about it in these same ways because in a lot of cases, at the early stages, as the founder, we, we start by doing everything, and then the second we can afford it, we start to hire out specialists. We start to hire out other people, sometimes not even specialists, just people can do the work, right? If it's just rote work, you hire people capable of rote work and they do the work, right? You don't hire a bricklayer.

If you're building a 6,000 square foot high house, you hire a bunch of them. Right? Right. So we've always had this concept that like, you know, we'll, we'll hire it out. We'll hire out the work. We'll, we'll divide the labor. We just have a different ability to do that. Right. GPT just became the assembly line to our Henry Ford. Right. We got the same 24 hours of work in. Yep. But we've got a hundred x the output now. You bet. You bet.

Now I also think another aspect which, which I, I don't wanna overlook or not get into, is just the fundamental concept of leadership. Be it a mixture of pure anxiety, like pure, unadulterated, anxiety, excitement in fervor, right? Yeah. Vision, which I think is a term that's overused, but it's, it's certainly a part of this. Right. And just fucking determination. Determination. Just be able to say determination, deciding that we are, we're going to keep doing this until we get it right.

Correct. AI's not gonna care. Yeah. Right. And, and nor should it. Right. That's the point though. Like if you look behind any successful company and frankly many unsuccessful ones, what you have behind this company is a freakishly determined person. Yeah. To see this through, despite all logic. Right. That's what makes founders the most unique, is that we are able to run in, run naked, into the abyss despite. Everything that would tell us otherwise.

Yes. And figure out how to somehow come out on the other side. I'll give you an example. Uh, you know, one of my favorite would be both Airbnb and Uber, right? Two famously successful companies with the dumbest ideas ever. Okay? When I say dumb, I, I, I, obviously, I, I'm kidding when I say this, but when those poor bastards had to go out there into the market and pitch this idea, they both got eviscerated. Rent your couch to strangers, right? Everyone who owns a car can be a taxi driver.

Now, who would fund that? Who would fund that? Right. That's the dumbest idea. Like do you have any understanding the first time someone doesn't come home from an Airbnb because yeah, they got taken. Or somebody that doesn't ever get out of a Uber cab is the end of that business. Like no one will ever use it again. And you know, I, I go back further. I go back to eBay. Wait, someone's gonna put pictures on the internet Uhhuh and say that they own something, right?

Yep. And someone's just gonna send them money and hope they, they actually had it. I'm gonna the money and hope it gets here. Yeah. Right. I'm like, that'll never work. Yeah. Somehow it did. Right? But my point is, do you know how many kidneys I've bought for the Prince of of Kenya? So, but here's the point, man. In order for that to work, you have to have an individual behind it that has an optimism, that looks beyond analysis, that looks beyond, you know, rationality.

Yep. And says, yeah, but what if, right? But what if Right. Like, and gets is the core of us agree, right? And gets other people to agree, right? From Absolutely. From partners to, to, to funders, to customers, to staff. And I get, that's what I was getting at before, right? Like again, AI can craft the blueprint. AI could probably even contract out the house, but like. You gotta live in it, you gotta convince somebody else to buy it, to live in it. That's not yet, we're nowhere near that yet.

Uh, so where we have that level of confidence in this thing.

So let me take this to the next level, right? If, if, if all this is true, if, if our uniqueness is our ability to create, innovate, lead, et cetera, then if we were to think about what's the job description? Of the next generation of founder. Here's how I've been thinking about it. You know, again, as a founder myself, I've been thinking about it as well. Number one, my job description is to stop doing things that something else can do for me, right?

Yep. Not of laziness, out of straight up efficiency. The second thing, and I think this is the hardest bit for, for me, Ryan, has been stop thinking in, in what your previous output terms were. It goes back what I said a moment ago. In one day I could create five pages. Yep. You're no longer the guy that can create five pages. That's taken me a long time to, to get outta that mentality. I still ha like, I think about my output still being a, a version one of will, so to speak. That's been hard.

How about you? I think for me it wasn't just about recalibrating the output, but even reconsidering the KPI. Right? So it wasn't like, okay, so not five pages of content, a hundred pages of content, neither. Right? So it used to be five pages of content. Now it's. How much impact did it have? Right? How many likes did it get? How, what? What was the intent of the car? Right? It depends on what the intent of the content was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But rather like getting to that final outcome.

Because writing the writing the newsletter wasn't the point. It's now let's measure it in how many pieces of positive feedback did we get on that thing, right? Because now we can focus on something entirely different, and by the way, feed that back into the machine and have it help us to achieve even more of that. So it's a shift from doing the work to creating the impact.

Correct. So I think that's really where it goes from because we used to just have to do the work and then measure the impact. Now I think we can just stay at more like the impact layer, at least theoretically, because we truly no longer have to do the work. At least three parts and, and also like again, how we think about building our organizations. It used to be add lots of headcount, like that was the seminal like bragging point. Right.

Yeah. You know, we've done whole episodes about this where it's like a CEO would say, well, I have this many people, and it would imply that that's like an army that they have the ability to, to go to war with, right? And, and more people. When are we gonna hear this? Brag Will, we're gonna hear this brag. We were gonna drop the headcount thing. Nobody's gonna say like, yeah, we just hit a thousand people. Like, yeah, we just hit, uh, 1500 a day on our, uh, on our API costs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

At some point that goes there, right? Like that becomes the new brag. It's like we are running so much AI within that, you're gonna have a lot of people who have to kind of recalibrate what that means. Sure. Particularly founders, because again, our old job description was get lots of resources, ergo, capital, humans, et cetera, to get big things done. And all of a sudden those same pieces don't mean what they used to. And we're like, wait a minute. My job isn't to go hoard all that stuff.

My job is to figure out how to be wildly efficient to, to be able to do 10 x with, uh, 10 x more, with 10 x less. Which by the way, for, for early founders is the best news in the world. Exactly. You don't have any resources. Right. But I think this is particularly difficult for, call it more seasoned founders like ourselves, is that we're calling ourselves these days. I'm trying to think a really kind word, but I think for, for us.

You know, we have to, to zoom out and say, dude, the way I was built in, in the world I came from before, thankfully does not exist. And I've gotta evolve. Yeah. I have to evolve to this next version of me. Or like everything else, someone else evolve for me. Yeah, man, I'm, I'm hoping we see more and more like. Comfort around that evolution. 'cause I'm still seeing a lot of people see that. Oh, you never do though, man. This is, this is the part, you and I have been through this before.

I know we went the earliest and, and we were still kids, so to speak, was the PC revolution. Remember how many, oh my God. How many people were like, I don't want one of those on my desk. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even my secretary and a typewriter. That went well. And then, you know, the era that we grew up, smack dab in the middle of the internet era in the nineties, every single person was like, you know, I don't want that damn internet. Right? Like, oh, that guy ain't around anymore. Right.

I will never forget it wasn't the sales call, it was a consult meeting, like was, we used to know, walk into people's offices and sat down and started explaining. And you, you've talked about this too, like explaining to people what the internet was. And this guy totally smug is like, oh, I have that right here in my desk drawer and pulls out the aol an a OL three and a half floppy, or maybe not aol. May have been, may have been copy. It was somebody right point being like. I had no idea.

And it was one of those people probably not around. Right. And all of those are dinosaurs. Right. The key for us as founders is not to be that dinosaur. Yeah. In order to not to be the dinosaur, you gotta embrace the change. Yeah. Even if you don't like it, it it, no one's saying you have to like it. No one's saying you have to be pro ai. You can hate ai. Yeah. But you have to evolve with it. It's part of the world right now. And yes, it's got a crazy number of drawbacks. Right.

Yeah. That's okay. That's okay. Uh, some of those will get worked out. Some of those will get worse if we're being honest. Yeah. But our job isn't to figure out why it's wrong per se. Yeah. Our job is to be able to say, okay, now I get to do this. Now I get to do this. Like now I get to write Ruby Code to make. Uh, drawer boxes, right? Yep. In, in a way that I could never do before, right? Yeah. Now I get to be able to answer questions in five seconds. That would've taken me a week. Right?

Now I get to do all these things. What does it mean for me? What is v two of me knowing that all, like everything has changed, right? And that I can kind of be like, uh, forever extended. Ryan, do you remember, uh, in the Matrix when, uh, he downloads Kung fu when Kea Reeves, uh, do downloads kung fu, right? That classic, oh, I know Kung fu. I tried for weeks to download Kung fu. It turns out I, it doesn't work. Well, so, but my point is like, we now have that ability, right. So to speak.

Yeah. Right. Like we now have that ability, if we don't evolve and leverage that ability, we will get replaced. Yeah, of course. Not by ai, but by the other founders who, who are actually using ai using it. Right, right. And, and using it and embracing it in the way that it's supposed to be. And so, so here's what I would say overall. I think, you know, when we look at the question, can AI replace founders? Yes. If we let it, yes.

If we let it, if we become no more than just those automatons that we're doing, you know, rote work, then, then yes, it can and, and frankly, right, it probably should. But if we zoom out and say, okay, uh, you know, some of that's scary, et cetera. But if I use this, if I exist as the architect, the curator, the creative mind, right, the mastermind behind all these tools, now I can create 10 x what I would've ever created before.

Now I can become a founder and, and have the, the outcome and the output that I've never even dreamed of before. At which point we evolve to that person. Literally anything is possible. 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.

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