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samantp
And looks like most of the document writing has been done by Claude. And that too a stereotype one (yawn)
digitaltrees
...And that insight is what changes everything. But not in the way people expect...
My wife laughs when I sent texts in claude speak and requests it when she needs a quick giggle.
david_shi
They don’t want you in the bake-off.
volkk
pretty apt actually. After skimming through it, it's mostly a big sales pitch on how to use Claude wrapped in AI slop with generic startup advice.
jreynar
It's nice to see an explanation of how they think you should use Claude for a host of different job functions / aspects of building a business, but the tone makes it seem like founding a startup is something you wake up one morning and just decide to do instead of, say, going to the park. Over coffee, you ask Claude about your idea and when it tells you "you're a genius" you're off. That's silly in so many ways. Statements like this "Validation cycles that used to take months now take afternoons" have an element of truth but ring with false promise.
And that relates to the lack of timelines and focus on how long things took around 2020 BC, that is Before Claude. Building a startup isn't like having a lemonade stand as a kid where you just don't bother to do it if you forget to buy lemons or it's rainy or something more fun comes along. There's a significant compound interest element to startups that's easy to overlook. Your codebase grows over time and so does your feature set and that collection of features attracts customers in a way one thing might not. You learn as go, of course, too.
This seems particularly relevant to the GTM section, which I was particularly amused by since that's what I'm focused on right now. It's a long game. Your blog post doesn't get found by anyone in Google until you've built up your SEO mojo, your LinkedIn post isn't read without the followers you need to accumulate and your content has to get engagement for people to see it even then, you don't start off line with a million followers on X, etc.
gurjeet
> 2020 BC, that is Before Claude
To avoid confusion and improve clarity, I propose 'BCC': Before Claude, Codex, et al.
nekooooo
exactly. validation by _whom_ exactly? not your customers!
doctoboggan
> Your blog post doesn't get found by anyone in Google until you've built up your SEO mojo, your LinkedIn post isn't read without the followers you need to accumulate and your content has to get engagement for people to see it even then, you don't start off line with a million followers on X, etc.
I hate that this is true. It's the worst part about selling stuff online IMO and I found that you have to spend so much time doing it. In many cases, selling something online can be optimized to the extreme such that spend on marketing should be as high as possible and spend on the product R&D, manufacturing, support, etc should be minimized as much as possible. This equation gives you the most profit, but also gives the customer the absolute worst product that is possible to sell.
Capitalism doesn't really have a solution to this problem that I've seen yet.
pgraf
This problem really bothers me as well. I think that ultimately this problem boils down to reducing search cost[0], which the internet has already partially done. I think AI will reduce them further if it is not captured by the advertisement industry for the average user. However, we cannot assume a fully rational customer in the real world. Especially in software, the customer does not know what they are looking for most of the time. Further they cannot evaluate how good your offering is vs competitors without investing a significant amount of time, which in turn increases search cost.
fragmede
Capitalism's solution to this "problem" is competition. If your widget sucks, but is cheaper, and mine is more. expensive, but better, then it's up to consumers to differentiate. eg Dyson makes expensive versions of gadgets. Some people see the value, others call them overpriced and then complain when the cheap knockoff sucks. It's -an imperfect system, but the free market is the solution to that problem.
empath75
> the tone makes it seem like founding a startup is something you wake up one morning and just decide to do instead of, say, going to the park.
I'm not sure it's a crazy idea when you can run a whole revenue generating company with basically zero employees. You could have a successful 'startup' generating 200k in revenue a year, you just need to cover the cost of your anthropic subscription.
hcheffer
[flagged]
hypfer
Feels like a category error.
It's a slide deck telling people what a product can do (that's a normal thing to release for a company), but the thing it tries to sell you on is building your own business based on their tool.
Which makes no sense the way they sell it, because "founding a business" is no standard process that could be formalized in a way like that, nor does it make sense for society to have people founding businesses at a scale comparable with mowing your lawn or doing your taxes.
All of this feels just unreal because it is unreal. Founding cannot be a commodity. If it is, you have no moat or point, meaning you instantly collapse again, because you are an interchangeable commodity.
Planktonne
It makes sense if you think of 'founder' as an identity like 'influencer', rather than 'someone actually seriously founding a business'; just as with influencers, some people will make a lot of money doing it for real, but many, many more will post enthusiastically on social media, living the aesthetic.
A lot of people already treat being a founder/entrepreneur as who they are, not what they do--witness the endless tide of LinkedIn posting about hustle culture, divorced from reality. This is an extension of startup chic.
zero_
this is well said. and to me this is crazy and sad at the same time.
kristianc
An enormous amount of LinkedIn appears to be more about gatekeeping what other people can do than doing anything yourself.
DonHopkins
They sell decorations, refreshment, cakes, costumes, games, and invitations for Founder Cosplay Parties.
dmujic
Yeah, and these days it really isn't a big deal to build things; it's much bigger challenge to actually develop a distribution channels and cut through the noise. I think people are just overwhelmed with everything and attention span is shorter and shorter. And that's the real issue - what I am finding now is that again the thing that really works is good old actual human conversation with potential clients.
fsloth
"Founding cannot be a commodity. If it is, you have no moat or point, meaning you instantly collapse again, because you are an interchangeable commodity."
IMHO you still need to find the product and PMF
There are bunch of books startup world recommends which sort of all start from the principle of product, users, traction.
This is sort of scaffolding around that. It's not entirely insane to try to formalize this process - there already are books that do this (Bill Aulet, Disciplined entrepreneurship).
"nor does it make sense for society to have people founding businesses at a scale"
Maybe not at scale of moving lawns but I'm pretty sure the world is full of nichces that still lack specific software offering or where options of software offerings are limited.
This is like "Uber for logging" or "time reservation system for cat dentists" level of "take existing product category and apply to a domain you know".
So not every cat dentist needs to found a cat dentist time reservation app but I'm sure there are niches withing niches with business opportunities awaiting.
glaslong
Yesssss. think there is a wealth of opportunity here in strictly non-scalable, probably even strictly non-profitable ways.
Where "founder" paints exactly the opposite image of what it really does unlock: everyone being able to build or tweak a little app they need; tailored just for their use cases.
A market size of a few people, a dozen, or a hundred, who can now get software that exactly services their niche. Something you'd never ever convince someone to build or maintain for you beyond the "smart niece/nephew" charity.
Could be a website for your local soccer league, a Bible reader with different font and bookmark treatment, a chart of your home canning cellar where you can send some jam to your friends and they send you kimchi.
There are probably nigh infinite tiny microcosms of unserved automation and functionality need like this. Where you can make the computer do what YOU need, not what a minimum of thousands-millions of other people mutually needed in the least common denominator.
There might even be a few larger needs in there we've missed, because they never got the chance.
thih9
We have seen that category in the past, in MLM.
Perhaps now it’s only two levels but still somehow pyramid shaped.
Gooblebrai
> Which makes no sense the way they sell it, because "founding a business" is no standard process that could be formalized in a way like that
It makes no sense, but most technical people wished it could be like that and that's who this article is aimed at
hypfer
Yes but that means that it is lying in people's face. Really just straight-up lying. No fancy words to soften it. Just lies.
Lying is bad.
Gooblebrai
As said in Seinfeld: "Jerry, just remember. Is not a lie, if you believe it"
uxhacker
Their argument on page 10 is that now agentic coding reduces the effort of writing code there will be far more failures unless you validate the idea properly.
We are actually seeing that in that the number of apps on the app stores is increasing but usage is not increasing.
Some would argue that the right process will lead to the right results.
DonHopkins
> there will be far more failures unless you validate the idea properly
You are exactly correct! You're very insightful to see that AI is perfect for validating ideas. It's not just sucking up, it's swallowing. Would you like to delve into coding up a Synchopancy as a Service web site?
jpadkins
Hah. Poe's law.
teaearlgraycold
The barrier to entry drops and so more garbage enters the market. This has happened many many times but there can be a massive and beautiful paradigm shift at the same time. Think about YouTube. Most stuff on there is garbage, but compare the good stuff of today to pre-YouTube content. To be quite honest, I think most of the best media is going straight onto YouTube.
weatherlite
I think a lot of founding is pretty much a commodity, e.g coming up with a viable idea and then implementing it has become rather easy now with these tools. The real barriers are access to capital and clients. From the startup I joined (I'm the 6th person) I see how much the founders personal connections are important. That indeed can't be commoditized yet. But the process of coming up with an idea and iterating on it ? The founders didn't even come up with our idea - they thought of something initially but the investor led them to his own idea - totally different. That's how the company was born. Now the first clients are connected to the investors. Etc.
So access to capital and clients, connections ,that's the last standing moat I think.
benfortuna
It's a commodity in the same way that making music is a commodity (i.e. using production tools to make it sound good). But music today is so much more generic and boring than it used to be.
hypfer
You seem to be mistaking the "rules" of the ZIRP SV nonsense bubble for the rules of reality.
Understandably so, but still.
zingar
It’s reasonable to say that there are things like discovery and validation that are necessary for every startup (to succeed) and that some techniques for these can be automated.
That we can describe something like “validation” in the abstract and automate some part of it says nothing about whether it’s worthwhile. I’m hard pressed to think of anything that anyone pays for that doesn’t meet this description. Why should being a founder be special or different?
rienbdj
This feels like a “sell the shovels” move. Social media is full of “this one prompt to get rich quick”. It’s the new “one weird trick”.
throwaw12
I like how dates and copies are still the ultimate version control:
"<filename>-05062026_v3 (1).pdf"
So there were 4 iterations on 5th of June alone for this document
y-curious
A beautiful analogy for non-technical founders creating software products with AI. There are version control systems, but who needs them when you can name your pdf `n-final-updated-6-16-final-donottouch.pdf (1)(2)`
trollbridge
And a good file store and organiser is arranging all kinds of icons in different corners on your desktop.
hansmayer
[dead]
OtherShrezzing
>As an AI-native startup founder, your responsibility is to know what's in your codebase, understand any potential exposure vectors, and not ship obvious vulnerabilities to real users who are trusting you with their data.
This is fairly funny coming from the company whose employees report merging in hundreds of PRs per engineer per day, and accidentally leaked their own source code through a security misconfiguration in a package manager they own.
supriyo-biswas
> your responsibility is to know what's in your codebase, understand any potential exposure vectors, and not ship obvious vulnerabilities to real users
It seems like CYA; with all the marketing about how LLMs will solve all problems it was really surprising to see that, but legal probably told them to go easy on it.
etoxin
Hundreds of PR’s per engineer per day! They would have zero visibility of their code. Their AI’s would have no visibility of the million plus lines of code.
Sounds super stable and cool.
vovavili
The best way to learn is from other people's mistakes.
koe123
100 PRs a day? I am sure this is hyperbole but otherwise you have a quote for me?
zingar
100 feels low given I just saw dependabot do 8 in one hour. No AI required!
It matters a lot what size the PRs are, and this varies wildly from place to place. I spoke to someone who instituted a “no PRs over 500 lines” rule. I would refuse to even read something that big unless it was just a find and replace or boilerplate.
koe123
Who reviews these 100s of PRs tho? 100 PRs in an 8 hour workday = 1 PR every 4.8 minutes.
If I saw this happening in my org it would be a huge red flag, am I old?
owebmaster
Here's your quote:
"employees report merging in hundreds of PRs per engineer per day"
geraneum
Yeah this is a Mythos pitch.
petterroea
This should be obvious but why would you trust what the spade seller says about being an AI-native startup.
Even if you believe AI-native startup is the future (the comments are divided), you would at least want to hear from an impartial source.
This is just marketing material.
losvedir
I'm interested in the concrete technical stack that "AI-native" start-ups use. No engineers and founders just go to full production scale on something like Lovable? Or code in GitHub, with something like Jules driving all the development via GitHub issues and comments (sidenote: does anyone have a good workflow for doing this with Claude/GPT?).
As someone who was the technical co-founder of a company before AI, I really feel like a lot of that role can be done by AI, if the foundation is laid appropriately.
OsrsNeedsf2P
I looked at the PDF and confirm there is nothing of value in there.
kubb
I’m pretty sure the one place people will never believe AI can be applied is “being a founder”.
There’s just too much invested, in terms of beliefs and money into the idea that founders are special and therefore deserve seven-eight figures off of the capital pumped into their unprofitable products.
You’ll see it here in comments. People will defend A”I” applied to software engineering wherever (not) possible, but building companies? Now listen buddy there’s an irreplaceable human genius at work.
mentalgear
Exactly, I always find it ridiculous how the suits, any layer of mid-managment to executives, are so eager on AI 'outsourcing' everything, but they themselves think the 'outsourcing' (if it really works) would stop just before their position.
Imustaskforhelp
I agree with you and adding on to it,
Anecdotally, Someone I know said that their manager just asks them if they have drank water or not and motivate them, and the company wants them to make on their personal time what they are building with AI and showcase it.
So they were joking that they were building a replacement of their manager using Claude, and although they were joking, but only partially.
If anything, the managers, rationally speaking might be the one to be outsourced.
Of course, though recently I have come to realize that world isn't completely rational but I have found that on the long term, it still rewards for rational behaviour (sometimes) so I think that these managers on Linkedin should feel a bit scared... (as they are probably just prompting AI to write the linkedin-texts)
What if they are already scared and this is their way of coping with it? Nobody wants their job to be redundant and I wouldn't say that tech is completely scott free but rationally I find that tech has this taste/authenticity factor and there are too many factors but I must admit that these AI companies are succeeding in trying to force the narrative about jobs being completely redundant combined with job market, to make the labour vs capital divide even larger.
I feel as if this is why people want to be on that side of the battle and this Linkedin-Ai-founder-syndrome is a symptom not the cause.
We engineers are trying to optimize from the tech side through let's say AI to building lots of tools that we otherwise couldn't have had made due to lack of time but we had many ideas from any issues we face at tinkering/work etc..
and the managers not having to do any of it, lack the ideas in that aspect but they succeed in trying to project something even if the reality of that thing doesn't exist. So they are trying to do that.
I don't know, I don't believe much in the divide of engineer vs manager but the fight is larger than it but we are infighting...
We are all just fighting to get to the other side of the line of a broken system but oh well, so it is and I am unsure in what capacity can we fix it but I still hope deep down that things will improve for better because I guess hope is what makes us human.
jstummbillig
Why would that be true? Successful founders have to be unsentimental by nature. If you make it harder on yourself than it has to be, you just get killed by people who don't.
swiftcoder
You know, I've been fairly convinced we could automate CEOs away since... ChatGPT 3.5 or thereabouts?
empath75
I demo'd an automated agent platform here and showed it doing PRs, and the CEO asked me what i'd do for a living after this did all my work for me, and I said, "What do you think that you do that an agent can't do?".
kelseydh
While you're not wrong the problem is they own the company or the board listens to them. They have power they can use to keep existing while you don't. This is why AI is so scary to working professionals.
Oras
AI has changed the build for sure, it is a lot easier to build now, a lot easier to practice multiple copywriting ideas, do market research ... etc.
There is something that will never change for being a founder, you need to sell, and for that you need network and credibility. It was never about the building, its all about the selling. AI has not changed that.
ElProlactin
> AI has not changed that.
But it has. AI can help you do market research, develop buyer personas, evaluate potential customers, create, analyze and enrich prospect lists, evaluate marketing channels, create ad copy, write sales scripts, think through objections and how to respond, etc.
Will it turn you into Jordan Belfort? No. Will it be 100% successful or effective? No. But can it help enough to make a difference? Sure, in enough cases.
sturza
Assumption: now everyone can do more of the above. The final line is still selling. So everyone will get to the sales part, FASTER. Triage will still happen at this stage, regardless of AI. You won’t be able to avoid this triage, regardless of how fast you get there.
agumonkey
I can't find a name to dig more but the "everyone will get" part is something strange to me. If everybody has the same capability increase, then what changed really ? some would even say it will increase the paradox of choice.. more offer, still the same amount of time to decide, or maybe more AI based decision to match the amount.. so less human understanding.
sdevonoes
By that logic, same can be said about code. So, ig everyone “gets there” equally fast, then nobody has an advantage
_fizz_buzz_
Unfortunately it feels close to zero sum to me. I am getting absolutely drowned in AI generated personal sales pitches now. That obviously scraped my name/company online and automated the email. I feel sales becomes even more relient on trade shows and conferences and person to person interaction (Only talking about B2B stuff that I am involved in).
jurgenaut23
If anything, AI has made it more difficult and challenging because every customer and investor is drowning in AI-generated collaterals, websites, etc. The situation is dire in the academic world, where both the applicants and the reviewers now rely so heavily on AI that both publishing and financing has turned into a lottery.
I am positive this will settle down at some point, but the difference will always remain about your own abilities, not that of AI.
ElProlactin
> If anything, AI has made it more difficult and challenging because every customer and investor is drowning in AI-generated collaterals, websites, etc.
In many markets, yes. If you're a software buyer, for example, your inbox, LinkedIn, etc. is filled with AI-generated sales outreach. And you know it's AI.
But keep in mind that there are tons of markets (think local services) where buyers aren't familiar with AI. They don't know that what they're reading was produced by AI, and they wouldn't care.
In these markets, if you use AI, you have a realistic shot at being "better" than your competition, and if you use it even a little bit more effectively, it can make a real difference.
Esophagus4
The same thing happened in other businesses where it became easier than ever to put out content or product, but harder to break through because of all the saturation.
LtWorf
AI generated market research won't necessarily match reality.
nieksand
Nor will human generated market research.
ElProlactin
And? Spending 1000s of hours searching on Google, reading human-written market research reports, etc. won't necessarily "match reality" either.
AI is a tool. A starting point. A feedback mechanism. It's not the end all or be all.
dakolli
If you're using AI for your marketing you're going to get lumped into a slop category, with plenty of other products to keep you company. Only people with AI psychosis actually believe this garbage. All LLM output has a cheap stench to it that's impossible to ignore.
There is no shortcut to hardwork, but llms somehow have people thinking that is the cases, it plays so well into people's desire to be as lazy as possible.
ElProlactin
Outside of the tech/AI bubble, you'd be amazed at how few people can spot AI-generated content, and how few people seem to care if they think the AI-generated content speaks to their needs.
I know a small business that generates many of their leads by responding to posts on social media. They recently started using AI to create personalized comments responding to these posts instead of generic comment templates they used before. The number of leads they're generating from their social media commenting has skyrocketed.
bdcravens
> ... its all about the selling. AI has not changed that.
Nor did the web, or mobile, or any other innovation. That doesn't mean you can't build your business around an innovation.
hatefulheart
With all due respect this reads a little deranged. To sell something to the masses you fundamentally need a product to sell. I'll agree that how you market the product can be a "product" in itself, but that only gets you so far. If it was never not about the building why waterfall vs agile why velocity why stakeholder why business analysts why meetings why board members pushing for features?
This is like when AI bros claim that AI has changed absolutely everything for their project but the first thing they do is reach for docker compose, react and postgres. Why don't you forget the bloat and have your LLM make your container, vdom differ and lightweight DB?
It's very surreal to have to point this out.
konradb
It doesn't read deranged at all to me.
To sell something to the masses you fundamentally need a product to sell. Agreed.
And you fundamentally need a way to find the customers for that product that need it at the time.
And you fundamentally need a way to interact with those customers that can persuade them to use your product.
Lots of aspects are vitally important to the overall success.
bob1029
> Now someone with no engineering background can build production software that brings their idea to life, while a technically adept founder with little business knowledge can easily produce a go-to-market strategy, a financial model, and a highly polished pitch deck.
I had a bit of a laugh. The non-technical business experts are much more likely to achieve success than the technical experts. They can actually talk to the customer and get the customer to care. No quantity of GPUs and gas turbines can correct for a lack of personality or reputation. The technology is generally not the hard part in most businesses, despite the extreme efforts of certain technology people to make it seem so.
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This isn't about how to build an AI-native startup, it's how to use Anthropic tools to automate 2019 style app building. An AI native startup would have AI infused into the product, and Anthropic doesn't want anyone but them to sell AI.