We Can't Predict the Future Anymore

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. Woo. Will the business of predicting the future is going outta business. Right? You know, forecasting used to be like pattern spotting, right? Mm-hmm. Markets were slow enough that a smart plan could outrun the variance, but. AI is kind of collapsing that luxury at record pace.

I mean, it feels like every assumption decays faster than I can even socialize it. Like are you even thinking in terms of long-term plans anymore? Like what's your take on this? Where are we going? What is happening right now? I gotta tell you, I am Mr. Future, right? I love the future. Yes, for the first time, the future is scary. And when I say that, it's both exciting and terrifying at the same time.

Because I look at founders and obviously we are in the thick of people building businesses@startups.com, right? Yes. All these people coming to us, and Ryan, how many people are you talking to right now that don't have an AI business? Right now? It's bringing everybody, right? It's everybody. It's blockchain and crypto all over again. Right? Exactly. But with a business model. Yeah, with a business model. Yeah. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. But what's interesting about it is.

It's not that, yes, AI has all these opportunities. It's that all these opportunities that are being created are also at the same time tearing away the very fabric and foundation of how we build businesses. Yeah. From how we get customers to who we employ, to how we raise money to literally everything that we forecast and plan the future against is being devoured, ironically, by the very people that are building the future.

A good example right now that you know everybody talks about is this idea of developers basically digging their own graves or the graves of all other developers. Like every time Claude comes out with a new tool to write code so that they don't need more people to write code. It's like the other developers go, dude, yeah. Hey, stop doing. Yeah. Pump the brakes, homie. Yeah, it's amazing.

No, it is. And to your point, like the pace at which this is happening has, has accelerated. I mean if you go back even just two years now, I mean like look at what's happening in two years when these tools became like very, very mainstream. Right? When all of a sudden your aunt is now using chat bt to answer questions, right? Like. It was a cool tool in everybody's hand, right? And that was just two years ago.

When you look at the way that curve has accelerated between, oh, it can kind of put out some reasonable code now too. It can put out an app now. It can now connect to backend database. It can now rate it. Now it's full product, right? Just give it a spec and it's off. And so. The sense that that horizon is becoming even shorter, that the future is becoming more and more caste and fog. At this point, man, my plans just feel like guesses with better font.

Like that's, that's all it feels like at this point. It's like, why am I bothering to write this shit down by the time I do, it's probably obsolete. I think there is a sense of excitement. But a cloud and fog of anxiety coming behind it. Okay, so now for a lot of the folks that that, that listen to this podcast, you know, they're all founders obviously.

There's a, a ton of jubilation, but what we get to see is we also get to see the other side where, you know, we get to kind of get behind the curtain with people and they're like, huh, didn't see that coming. Right. Or a lot of people with existing businesses that are like, huh, here's a great one. You know? What a great one. How about being at Google right now? Yeah. Where you've got one guy in one room, okay? Yep. Trying to, to build the best, most amazing AI engine ever.

Well, the other guy in the other room, who by the way, has the job that pays all the bills called Search. Yeah. Is getting cannibalized by 'em. It's like, dude, yeah, you do. What's, what's going on here? Yeah. You're literally watching the snake eat its tail in real time. It's unbelievable.

So this episode is gonna be about not just the fact that AI is doing all these great things, it's also gonna be talking about how many things AI is about to make much more difficult for us and the forecastability of founders and kind of. What we're seeing across the board for founders that this isn't all, you know, sunshine and rainbows. There's some really big problems that this is creating for us to be able to forecast and build businesses.

So let's start with all of the foundations that we've been used to forecasting against, like the big ones. That have all gone away or crumbling the fastest. You're our chief marketing officer@startups.com. Let's talk about the marketing pillars first. What could you count on first? What's going away? Yeah, I mean like organic search is becoming eviscerated, right? That was something that if you had taken the time to build that, you had a fairly defensible castle there, right? Like right.

It takes a long time to build, but then if you're paying attention to the shifts, you could, you could kind of say, okay, well like, yeah, we're losing some traffic here. Okay, let's, let's bolster that. Let's build some new content. Let's make a microsite, let's do whatever. Just getting shot to pieces. And so what you would typically do in that place say, okay, well right now somebody's just eaten our lunch, so we'll just buy it back.

We'll just switch over to paid search until we, until we buy that back. But when nobody's searching. What do you do? Right? Nobody's searching and, and Ryan think of how many businesses that affects, right? So we are an online business like, oh, you're those tech guys. Dude, it affects plumbers, right? It affects everybody that, that has anything to do with, you know, the internet drives your business, which is kind of almost everybody. And it's happening across channels, right?

So one of the things that we, you know, everybody's getting excited right now because the barriers are getting so much lower, right? So this is one of the things that you were saying before. Founders are excited about the fact that like, look, I can code now. I couldn't code before. So can everybody else. So can everybody else. I can crank out 10 times as much, uh, social media content now that I could before. So can everybody else. That is the biggest problem.

Just keep inserting that everywhere you look right and, you know, the, the inundation of content people are just becoming blind to content now like it is. It was already tough, right? Yeah. The last five years, in terms of what it takes to capture someone's attention, has become extremely hard. Yep. In the last year, it has become damn near impossible unless you happen to be the end result in a chat GBT conversation. Right?

The chance that somebody's just gonna come and visit you, uh, has become significantly lower, uh, and significantly, exponentially lower. You know what's funny is yesterday all these podcasts also double as a newsletter that we send out to all of our members. And yesterday one of our members wrote back and said, will I gotta be honest, this sounds like chat gt. Right. And he cited a couple of things in the newsletter.

That's, that sounded like Chachi, BT, and I said, you know, what's the most embarrassing thing? It's not, yeah. It's like the most embarrassing thing. No, I took the time to write this so that it could look like AI content. Actually did write that. Right? And, and, and I, I joked him, I said, maybe I'm spending so much time these days with Chachi bt that I'm inheriting Chachi Bt. Like, like their nuances. But what I'm saying is even my own prose doesn't sound like me anymore.

I mean, and it, it actually is me. That'd be like us, somebody watching this podcast and make, honestly, it doesn't even sound like you guys anymore. Yeah. Like god damn man. I can tell, I can tell by the way Ryan's looking directly into the camera, that that's just eye contact, right. He's not really doing that. Of course. I'm, oh my god damn, taking years of practice to learn to do this and now it doesn't matter anymore because Nvidia can just make that happen no matter what. I know. And so.

I say this, okay, so that's one pillar and, and we just, I mean, scratch the surface. One pillar was if I launch a business, whatever it is, I have certain places I can count on to either develop or buy traffic. Yeah, I can get traffic to my thing. Yep. And for a very long time, that was a fairly well understood mechanic foundation. Now it's kind of going away.

Yeah, let's look at some other pillars, because that's just one, and you touched on something that I, I don't wanna let go when it's easier for you. It's easier for everyone else, and it becomes a race to the bottom. Yes. So, oh, I can post on social media easier. I can make, uh, responses to people's comments on my social media easier. So can everyone else, and they will really quickly, really poorly.

Ryan, how many of the comments on your social media, your LinkedIn, whatever, are actual people anymore? Maybe, maybe, I'm not kidding. Five to 10% max. Right? That happened in five seconds. Was man, interesting. Is that like Right? And that, so this is one of the funniest things. So when, when people started using AI to post a lot more content, they were like, and it's getting engagement. And then if you go and look at the engagement. That's all AI nonsense, right?

That's not actually engagement. So you know, everybody's really excited, but they're like, look, I can just crank out stuff that sounds kind of like me and I'm getting better engagement than ever. No, you're not. Not when you actually peel back the curtain there and go, the wizard deposit is standing back here commenting on behalf of everyone. That was my chat. GPT. Talking to everyone else's chat, GBT. Neat. What have we done here? Nothing.

Dude. The signal to noise ratio has never been further out of whack, right? Like right On the other hand, it's kind of like walking through a garden in November and finding like a ripe strawberry. Out there. It's like when you do find something, you appreciate it so greatly. It's like, God, I haven't seen these, I haven't seen these since June. This is amazing. Right? But it's so rare and they're so hard to find it, and there's not like a reliable way to do it.

And I think that's what's really frustrating. Um, a lot of marketers right now is that like, even if you want to do the right things, even if you are building high quality content and just really good stuff, your ability to accurately distribute that to people and have them know is almost zero. I agree. So it's becoming so frustrating that people aren't even trying at this point.

I'm watching tons and tons of marketers mail it in, not because they're not capable, not because they don't want to, but because it gets the same damn result. So why not? And that really scares the shit outta me. Okay. Let's take that then. So marketing is becoming an imploding foundation, right? Yes. At a co on itself. The very tools that we're supposed to make it better yes. Are actually eroding it. Okay. Oh, completely. Big time. So that's not a small one, guys. That's a giant one.

Next up, as part of building a business, we are gonna hire talent. We're gonna hire humans. Okay? Now this, this has a two-sided concern to it. One was, well, I need to hire, this is again, internet companies, but whatever. I need to hire developers. I need to hire marketers. I need to hire, um, ops people and hire all these people. And now it's like, do I, what would they do? Remember everybody had the consummate social media manager. Yeah. Yeah. What does that person do anymore? Right?

Like it's become less of a bot. Now, again, I'm not knocking the social media manager. Let's move over to the developer. Okay? Yeah. Ryan, you've been cranking out stuff and lovable as an example. Yep. Right? If you were building a new company five years ago, there's absolutely none of what you've been cranking out that you could have done by yourself. Impossible. At that level, like connect to a database layer or anything else like that? Nope. Let alone make it responsive.

All the other things, right? Forget there's so many things that been possible, forget about, right? No different than prior to Shopify. You, in order to get that level of e-commerce and CMS and everything else, like tied to that. No way. And it's damn near free. That's the other side of it, right? This isn't like HubSpot pricing. It's so cheap that it's inconsequential. Like the, the cost of it doesn't actually matter. So who are you hiring for that as part of your new company? Yeah. Right.

And are you hiring somebody? Because if you do like, and then you find out five minutes later that their job is a prompt now. Yeah. What's that look like? Right. Right. In the converse, if you are that person, the social media manager, the developer, like people who are fundamentally the staples of our ecosystem, of our startup world. Right. Every startup weekend. Right. You know, we always talk about Startup weekend. I don't even if it's around anymore.

There was always a, a social person or a marketing person, a developer person or product person, whatever. Like you're putting together your role playing, uh, team, you know, it's exactly right. You, yeah. You're dungeon Dragon Party. Gotta have a warrior, a mage. And all those people aren't employed now. It's bizarre. Yes. And, and the reason I'm bringing this up is because of definitely a fundamental pillar of building a company was hiring people.

Now there's so many, some people listening and they're gonna say, well, that's bullshit. I'm still hiring people, et cetera. I get it. We, we have a staff. It's not like we have nobody that works here, but it's getting weird. It's getting weird. Right, and I'm not, I'm not pointing this to toward our staff. I'm saying for startups as a whole. Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's getting weird to say, what are we hiring for@startups.com?

We don't have a single open position 'cause we can't figure out who we'd even hire. Right. How weird is that? Yeah, yeah. You're constantly trying to figure out how the people you already have. Probably could and should or are already doing more than they ever were before. And so just by virtue of, of some of those productivity increases. Now again, like I said before, some of those actually came with performance drops, right?

Meaning that like I can crank out 10 X the content that I ever could on LinkedIn and it'll get. 20 x the engagement it ever did with absolutely zero meaningful results. Right, right. So there, there is that side of it, but it seems like all of those productivity gains and all of this like expanded capability just erased future hiring needs at, at least for a, the foreseeable future, which again. He's now like, dude, do we have a roadmap anymore?

I feel like our roadmap is just an etches sketch being written by somebody in a really bumpy ass car. Right? Like it's just constantly erasing itself. Shaking. Yeah, because it's a great metaphor. It's a self shaking etch of sketch. That's what we're building our roadmaps on at this point. How the hell do you hire against something like that, buddy? Let's go back five years. Let's go back to COVID. Oh my God, right.

Um, where it was just a hiring spree where people needed 400 engineers to build a venture funded, funded company. Yep. Right? Yep. And, and, and what I'm getting at here, it's not that you don't need to hire anybody. I'm not saying that. I'm saying one of the fundamental pillars of building a startup was hiring a ton of people, or at least hiring it all, right? Yep. In that whole world. Is getting so twisted and turned upside down. And again, this episode is about the predictability.

Yeah, it's about stuff. We used to be able to just say, yes, you'll need that. Or yes, it's a known and we're going, what the hell just happened? What the hell just happened? Bring it back to hiring. At this point, like if I were to think about a person that I'm not already working with, one of the number one things on the top of my, my list would be swap ability. Right? Yeah. Like as I'm thinking about a human stack like this has, this person has to be swappable, right?

Yep. I have to, to contract for outcomes at this point, not roles. It just has to be like outcome driven, which may only be. Two or three weeks worth of work. But that's as far out as we can see. As far as I'm gonna plan, that's as far out as I can hire. If hire is even really it, like at this point, contracting would be where it's at for me, not full-time roles. Uh, because honestly, like I wouldn't feel comfortable. I wouldn't feel responsible hiring somebody when I know that.

The whole thing that I'm gonna have them doing might get completely eviscerated, obliterated within weeks. Right? That feature that we're specing out or that campaign that we're building out might turn into a prompt next week, or it might just become completely irrelevant because now chat, GPT does the thing that we were planning on marketing. Right? Who knows? Okay, so let's stick with that.

'cause you're, you're now talking about the next pillar, which is product. Yeah, it used to be that if we took the time to build and invest in a product, that we had some level of understanding that that product would be relevant for some period of time. You know, a moment ago, you and I were talking, you know, uh, prior to the show, uh, we were talking about, uh, TurboTax. Yep. We were talking about your products that like, you know, have been around forever. Forever.

Yeah. That thing has been the world's greatest cash cow. You know, Intuit is actually just the amount of money that company has made on frigging TurboTax. Yes. Which is a dog shit piece of software Yeah. That I've used religiously for decades. Right. It might as well come on a three and a half inch floppy disc. Right. I mean, it probably still does 'cause they haven't updated the product enough to, you know, make it worth having a cd.

But I say this, they have an understanding, they have a pact with the market that says, this product does this thing, and we do this thing in the, in the market. And you know us. You trust us. And for better or for worse, for the price point that we offer, this is the most efficient way to do this thing. And they, and that pact is held true and then it didn't. Right? Now look, software consumes itself all the time, but this one's different. This is like, it gets consumed and then gone forever.

Yeah. How is an entire tax planning industry getting consumed forever? And I'm just picking on one randomly yesterday, and again, I'm kind of date stamping this a little bit. We're in Q1 of, uh, 2026. The Washington Post let go a third of their staff, right? Most people don't notice these headlines. I watch all this stuff and they said part of what's happening is that people aren't searching anymore. They're just using ai.

That's just the, the Washington Post, and that obviously affects everybody with an information business. They can no longer deliver news because the people that would look for news don't even go to the internet to them.

Right? Right. They got subsumed by AI and chat. Think about how many entire industries just vanished. Like Thanos snapping his finger. Yeah. Right. Whoa. You can't even rely on the fact that if you build a product that the entire market. Won't just implode dude in a year. In a year. Right? That's, and that, and that's right now, so this is where that's happening right now. Absolutely. Crazy to think about.

Again, this, the curve is, is getting steeper and steeper. It's accelerating. And so, you know, watching industry implode in a year might happen in a week by this time next year. Because the, the speed, the adoption and the rate of change is just continuously accelerating at this point. 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.

The last one I wanna touch on and again, and we'll, we will just kind of like, like lay out all the ones is investment. I think this one's just ing. Yeah. It's not being talked about enough. Yeah. Investment. If you are an investor right now. You know, you are definitely one of the pillars of the startup ecosystem. You've gotta be saying AI is the greatest thing, so many opportunities, but if you're watching all of these other pillars fall, there's gotta be a part of you going.

Well, where's my capital go? Exactly. Yeah. Because my capital actually went to all of those things, will and Ryan just described, yeah, I put capital in marketing, I put capital in people, and I put capital in product. If those things don't make sense anymore. Ah, where does that money go? Exactly? Data centers. Yeah, exactly. Basically, yeah. It goes to compute, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

When talent shifts from headcount to headless product shifts from apps to prompts and agents, and distribution goes from search to synthetic answers, it's like, what are you putting your money into at that point? That's a problem truly. Now, again, you can, you can look on the other side of it and say. Not a problem for me. I'm a founder. I didn't wanna deal with those guys anyway. And you would be correct, right? Yes, you would be correct. Right?

Amen. However, that is a fundamental institution within the startup ecosystem that is losing a home. Now, I'm sure you have no lack of, of investors that will say that is a. Totally untrue, and here's a whole thesis where so many industries will built that will require so much capital, yada, yada, believe some of that, I believe, yes, there are some foundational layers that you're seeing right now that will require a voluminous amount of capital, but if every one of those foundational pillars.

Is all being consumed at a record rate, and by way of that, their efficiency is taking away cost. I have a hard time believing that the need for capital is going to become exponential or more so anytime soon. Anytime soon is all of the costs and all of the the traditional cost-based barriers to starting a startup. Reduced geometrically exponentially. The idea that cash still needs to be part of the picture becomes a lot harder unless we're just gonna start compensating founders for taking risks.

Right. Which I'd be okay with that. Right. It's this weird thing because it's almost like if, if you're a vc. And you're looking at four year projections and more so the, uh, use of funds that people are raising for. And obviously raise amounts have gone up geometrically. I mean, we are in the business of helping people raise, so we see it. Uh, and you're looking at use of funds. There's gotta be a version of you that's like. I wanna give more.

I wanna write bigger checks because that's how I raise bigger funds. But at the same time, like, have you not seen what's going on in the world? No. Yeah. Yeah. What are you going to spend it on? Yeah. Like I loved when you hired 400 engineers. That worked great for me as an investor. Yeah. Because you needed lots of me. Right. But if you needed 400 engineers now to do whatever the hell it is you're doing, unless you're building some foundational layer. I'm shocked. Play that out for a second.

Will. And you're, and you're far more versed in this space than I am. 'cause what we saw, right? It's, it's not like now that rounds are exponentially larger and they are. Right. Yeah. Yeah. When, when rounds became exponentially larger, it's not like the investors started taking exponentially more of the cap table. Right. They're taking the same chunk of the cap table. Yeah. Rounds just got more expensive. Overall valuations were, were higher. All this was higher.

Now, I guess theoretically the final outcomes maybe became. Geometrically larger, uh, in some cases, maybe exponentially larger, but the odds didn't change any, right? It's not like because we're pouring more money into these companies, they're more, more sure of succeeding. So did anything actually change? And so it's theoretically, could it just, could we just see a regression to the mean, where the rounds become much smaller? But so did the initial valuations.

Which would actually make all the sense in the world because the risk profile is gonna go up significantly more because this app you're building, this software, this company, this whatever, could be wiped out by something else really, really quickly because that time to deploy, time to build all those things we just talked about are so much faster. So theoretically, that is one place within startup dom that I could actually see.

Normalizing. Yeah, I was gonna say, I, I definitely see a rubber band on that one.

Yeah. And the reason being is because when AI first comes out and everyone's like, oh, we're gonna do this, but with ai, and we say this to, to startups all the time, so founders, listen. If you're, you know, doing a SF, we say, yes, that's true. Right now you're doing law something. But with ai, cool. Yes, absolutely makes a ton of sense. You do understand that within 24 months, that's how everyone will be doing law.

Yeah. The fact that you're doing it, it's exactly like saying, but we'll be selling books online. Yes. But eventually everyone looks how you'll sell books. Course you sell books. They will be online. Yeah, exactly. Right? Yeah. You have to be, you have to be able, you have to take it beyond that.

And man, that's the thing that I think is so fascinating right now is, is, and it's not just that AI as a whole becomes table stakes, but so many things that were problematic or challenging from a cost or complexity standpoint, they're becoming table stakes, right, left and right. Left and right, and so I think that. Just, again, it just makes it so hard to see around the corner.

We're moving so fast and, and the corner's so sharp at this point, folding back to predicting the future now, but it's just, it's so complex. Well, so if you and I build AI TurboTax and we're, we're gonna say we're coming after Intuit, we're gonna take their market share, et cetera, then, then, right now, in this very moment, in 2026, we by all means, have justified the upside potential of our valuation. Yep. What I'm saying, the rubber band happens. When you fast forward to 27, 28.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. When everyone can do what we're doing in our defensibility to have taken, including into it, by the way, can do that. How do we maintain our defensibility? How we do we maintain our moat when the moat has lowered for everybody. That's where it gets way more interesting. That's exactly it. You know, right now AI might be a competitive advantage for some companies that are just moving a little faster and not, not even a lot. You bet. But it compresses build time. Right.

But it shrinks moats, or in some cases it's gonna completely dry them up. Right. Turns products into features like full on products. Like you think about that, like the fact that TurboTax is a product, right? That may not even be a product category anymore. That might just be part of personal financial suite and just every literal, literally everything happens there. Your banking's there, your taxations there, your savings there, your investments, right?

Because we're seeing products getting turned into features at at machine speed at this point, right? Right. Which is crazy. I agree. Now, here's what happens.

All of these things, all of these pillars, all of these changes, as they start to drop, it starts to compound anxiety and watch what happens. Right now we are in this, oh my God, this, this party's gonna be amazing. The hangover hasn't happened yet. Right Ryan? I think you're starting to see the first bits of it. It was, I'm feeling it. Oh my God. I can create more content on social and then you're like, wait a minute. Hold on. So can everybody else.

Oh my God. I can do this thing in, um, uh, there's one new AI app. Yes. So can everybody else, I think what will start to happen is we'll start to see this compounding anxiety where founders start to go, wait a minute, now everybody can do this. That's a problem. Right. And that's when things start to get really interesting when everybody has the machine gun, right? Like war becomes a lot more complex and, and, and I think that's where we're headed next.

I feel like we're at that point in the arms race where everybody looks around and goes. Shit, this isn't gonna work. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We're all armed to the teeth, which just means we're all gonna face a lot of pain because of this. Yeah, no, I, I think the compounding anxiety thing is, is huge right now, and I think there's still a lot of people looking around for certainty. Which look never really been part of the startup space. Right?

Even if you thought that it was there, there are a few things that are certain, none of them are fun, but I think at this point we have to give up on certainty a little bit and, and what I'm looking for, instead of certainty, I'm saying what I need is cadence, right? I need cadence. What does that look like for you? It's essentially like decision making frameworks.

It's, it's how we're deciding what to keep, what to kill, and getting into, you know, like going from quarterly strategies to, to monthly strategy and to weekly tactics. You know, you and I talked to this before on the podcast. We, we plan in, in, in week long sprints, right? Yeah. You and I down manages their time on, on weekly schedules, um, which helps, right? And so having that cadence and basically going back to what I said before around the human component of, of swap ability, right?

Really. All of my plans are modular and component based. At this point. They have to be, because I need that cadence. I need to have that cadence in place so that if something does need to swap, I'm not starting again from Fresh plan. It's okay. The plan was go get traffic for this. This is still valid, this still needs traffic. But that thing we were gonna use to go get traffic isn't. Um, so we don't need to start from zero, but we have to have something else that we can plug in there. Right?

Really? Quickly. So I can't be certain that a, that a quarterly plan around, uh, social media traffic acquisition is gonna work. So I need a cadence of an operating cadence that allows me to, to quickly act on those changes. I think it's interesting though because we get all of these different folks that are part of the ecosystem with a very uncertain future.

At the same time, you know, we talked about this a moment ago with these pillars falling, and that's why we opened up the conversation there because again, if you're an investor, and investor seem to be very cocky about the future, but there's no version where you're sitting there going, oh, this is all gonna work out great. Ryan, if you and I had a fund right now, yes, there are so many industries ripe for the picking, right?

If we can invest in the person who takes over TurboTax, we're gonna do great. Our concern would be, and then what? What happens after that? Like how do they stay relevant? How do they stay on top? And, and we'll be good for a minute. The second part is we're in the business of deploying lots of capital. Like that's specifically what we do. Capital efficiency actually isn't necessarily our friend, right?

When, when startups needed to hire 400 engineers to be competitive, that actually kind of worked for us, right? Yep. They needed a lot of us, right? The other compounding anxiety, and again, these are all the players in the same space at the same time, kind of freaking out a little bit. If you were a developer right now, right? Who was the holy grail most protected made man there was in the startup ecosystem, right? The rockstar developer, right?

Like you were literally, literally gave the, the rockstar developer, okay. That you had that level of cred. You're worried about your job and how could you not be? Right. If, if that was my trade, if I was specifically writing code and I'm sitting in front of all these tools and be like, dude, that's literally, you know, I'll give you a perfect example because I actually live this, I live this in. Ryan, you'll appreciate this. In 1999, I was you running a large web design firm?

Yep. And on average we were getting paid somewhere around a million dollars to build what's essentially like a brochure website for like massive grants. Yep. Right. Yep. And you'll, you know where this is going. In. One day, one of our, uh, designers comes in and he's like, Hey, man, I, I stumbled upon this site called template monster.com. And uh, these templates are actually really good. They're like, in some cases better than what we design. I'm like, yeah.

And he is like, and it's a hundred dollars. I'm like, a hundred dollars for what? Uhhuh? He's like, the whole thing. The whole thing. Yeah. Every single PDF or uh, pixel p SD file, you need to do three is like full HTML and like, you know, at the time, JPEGs and whatever, and I'm like, huh. Right. That's exactly the way I would feel right now if I was a quarter million or a half million dollar a year developer. Yeah. And I sat and saw what Claude did last week and I'd be like, hmm.

Now granted, I'm not saying there's no value in those folks. I'm saying you lose the premium, right? The the premium always comes with the fact that there's not enough of you, right? It's just that simple. There's not enough of you. Yep. Or if I just graduated with a CS degree and I'm jumping in into a market where I was told five seconds ago that this is where all the jobs are and the people that are veterans in this space are like, dude, where am I gonna go? I mean, come on, man.

Doesn't give you warm fuzzies. No, that's gonna, that's gonna drive serious anxiety. And I think we're starting to see that some of the thinking around is already not aging particularly well. And this thinking's only, you know, maybe nine months old, which was, okay, look, this isn't gonna take your job, it's just gonna make you be able to do 10 x more of your job.

Maybe true, but it also implies that there's a need for 10 x more of your job times the number of people who also have your job and the number of people who want your job. Right. It doesn't change that. Right. Like just because we can, it's musical. Just because we can write more content doesn't mean like I can write 10 x more content. Cool. Do people have 10 x more time to read? Because if not, what the hell are we gonna do with all of it? It's really interesting.

And so what I'm pointing out here, and you know, this lack of forecastability is coming on top of these pillars are dropping. The folks that are the cornerstones of this ecosystem are getting awfully anxious for good reasons. Yeah. And I say this, Ryan, because it's, I love doing episodes where we just talk about how great. AI is, and I do, I do believe it. I think that, you know, AI in a whole is phenomenal. It's great. It is. But I also wanna point out, shit's getting a little gnarly man.

Right? It is there. There's some stuff happening behind the scenes that no one's really talking about, and there's more of it than people realize. A lot. There's a lot more like I just, here. Here's one, right? I was talking to a group of other founders the other day about this. When founders, teams, investors, vendors altogether can no longer price, risk, commitment melts, man, right? Again, it's that compounding anxiety.

Everybody has that commitment and nobody wants to be the sucker who bets on a product. That becomes a frigging plugin. Right. And so one of the, the concerns then is do we actually start to see a slowdown in the rate of like overall progress and thinking and development, right? The thing we haven't seen yet is that AI's not out there just going, well, I just figured out this problem that people have. I'm gonna go solve it all by myself. Maybe it will get there, right? Not yet. Right.

But it's still people deciding and people chasing real problems and people having those problems. And so I think that that's, it's, it's a super interesting thing to think about is that as you start to take away the incentives, bad things can start to happen. We saw this, here's a parallel. I don't remember the timing on this. I probably used to, but at the point which we started to take away financial incentive from teachers. The US educational system started to decline very, very seriously.

Right? And we started to do the same thing within medicine and medical outcomes started to to decline. Seriously, we take away the financial incentive from from innovators and technologists. What happens, right? We'll see the same thing play out again, and I'm afraid that's what we're running towards at this point. Here's what I'll say though, and you touched on this.

It turns out that of all the people that are kind of, you know, had this compounding anxiety, the one group that happens to be very well suited to all of this Oh yeah. Are founders, like of all the people that were like built for risk, that were built for chaos, that were quite like specifically built to like constantly look for problems and constantly figure out how to tear shit up. Are founders now?

Yeah. Granted, those founders, they'd need help from all those people, and that's always been the way. But I would argue, and I find this fascinating, that if there's ever a time for the people who had it in them, who basically starve for chaos. Yeah, this is your moment, man. If you are built like that. I think I mentioned this once, once long ago. There was one of the greatest, uh, commercials I've ever seen, and it was for the Marines and, and it showed this huge explosion, right?

And all this smoke and dust, and it showed all these people running away, and then it just panned in on this one guy's face. And he looked at the camera and then he looked at the smoke and he just started running directly to it. And they basically said. For the people who run toward not fear or something like that. And it said US Marines. Right. And I was like, that's the most badass commercial I've ever seen in my life. That's kind of what I picture right here.

Feels like where we're at right now. Yeah. And look to, to your point, like this is what we're here for. We're here to solve problems. And if what we're saying is that, wow, this is taking away our ability to solve them like we did, it's gonna create a whole bunch of new problems, a whole bunch of new problems like unemployment, like income, like you name it. Like there's gonna be all kinds of brand new problems that are created, that you're gonna need solutions at some point.

And so I think that's, that's part of this is if I'm trying to use a crystal ball at this point. I'm not looking at, okay, how do we keep doing exactly what we're doing in the context of ai? Like with, with all the changes that AI require, I'm like, okay, what happens when we stop doing all this stuff? Yep. Right? What does that look like? Right. Let's solve those problems because they're coming. I can't predict exactly how they arrive or why, or when.

You can sort of see the writing on the wall at this point. There's going to be some really big ass problems. And to your point, that's what we're here for. This is what we do.

We're in the problem business. So if you look around and take a look, reverse everything we just said on this show, right? Yeah. Reverse that and say, Hey, if. Investors are gonna have problems. Dude, let's think about coming in and becoming an investor that that's capital efficient, right? Yeah. People are gonna have problems being able to, to find customers. You know, marketing's gonna change.

Let's become a new type of agency that figures out how to get people in this, this new category, right? People are gonna have problem finding employment. Let's become a new type of recruiter that recruits like in that business. In every one of these situations, when things get upended, there are more problems, and we are in the problem business. Like that is what we actually specialize in.

So when I'm saying that there's a lack of forecastability, there is, there is a tremendous lack of forecastability. Right? But with that, it just so happens that the only people that are actually built in, suited for this massive bit of compounding chaos are us. Right? Like, and we can look at this like, oh shit, this is hard to forecast. Or we can look at this and go. Dude, it's party time.

Yeah. I'm running straight toward this thing and it's not gonna be easy and it's gonna be kinda weird, but this is what I'm built for and this is what I'm gonna focus all of my time and energy toward, and I'm gonna run toward this problem while everybody's running away. I'm gonna run toward it and I'm gonna go build shit. In the hardest time ever. I'm gonna build the biggest thing I've ever done in my entire life. Overthinking your startup because you're going it alone.

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