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Discussion (89 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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.
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.
It makes no sense, but most technical people wished it could be like that and that's who this article is aimed at
Lying is bad.
Perhaps now it’s only two levels but still somehow pyramid shaped.
So access to capital and clients, connections ,that's the last standing moat I think.
Understandably so, but still.
It absolutely does. AI and robots drives the cost of labour down; it's good for capital, bad for labor. If everyone is a business owner then everyone can benefit. A hundred years ago the majority of Americans were self-employed; mass wage labor is a recent phenomenon.
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.
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.
I am positive this will settle down at some point, but the difference will always remain about your own abilities, not that of AI.
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.
AI is a tool. A starting point. A feedback mechanism. It's not the end all or be all.
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.
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.
Nor did the web, or mobile, or any other innovation. That doesn't mean you can't build your business around an innovation.
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.
(Technically that also applies to MS Teams, Google and so on and not just AI)
From 2015-2019 I spent the whole time saying "If I don't write the code nobody does". It was the point of saying to do anything requires a team, to build that team you need funding. It was a vicious cycle and took a long time to get enough traction to raise funding and do that... and then you end up in the MVP loop -> hire -> build -> validate -> rehire -> rebuild -> revalidate. Today all of that has changed. You don't necessarily need the team to write the code, it's for a different function entirely, maybe the original function which is the team was the orchestration engine for all the different pieces at play to make a company and product successful. The code is only half the equation. Looking forward to seeing how solo entrepreneurs leverage these tools and how teams transform using them.
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.
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.
Sounds super stable and cool.
"employees report merging in hundreds of PRs per engineer per day"
"<filename>-05062026_v3 (1).pdf"
So there were 4 iterations on 5th of June alone for this document
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.
So either go viral or go home.
Obviously personal connections, timing, market position all play role but let's be honest - this is not something that can be planned although in retrospect it may seem so. A % of the population will get all of this right many times in a roll but this is just mathematical certainty.
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.
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.
Stats please
Loss of objectivity
The challenge: Ask an AI tool for evidence supporting what you already believe, and it will find it. Confirmation bias now comes with a research engine.
Who knows, maybe an AI ideated and AI created product will be the best app of 2026.
I've noticed that seemingly every single tech company has re-branded themselves as "AI" company. Add a RAG system and you're now AI. Add a AI-chatbot, and you're now AI.
It's kind of analogous to how I'm writing code right now. For simple stuff or low priority stuff I'll fire claude at it and won't look at the code if it works. But for the important stuff I'm very carefully integrated into the cycle making sure what's coming out at the end is just right. I'm carefully constructing prompt loops and validation cycles to make sure what comes out looks like what I want - because I have the knowledge and experience of what works for my specific use case. Drafting an investor memo seems like the second category of thing, you need it to be right. I don't think claude offers much of value there. What's more - if you start slopping your investors, you are going to piss them off. Unless Claude is going to say it has some special data source it's used to train on so it knows good from bad, I think this is a bad idea.
This article also kind of fits in the category of "Here's how to use AI for EVERYTHING!" and actually it would be far more valuable to say "This is the bits that AI is good at, and here's where you need to do it yourself" - which is obviously a position that Anthropic can't hold.
Here is the direct link to the slides:
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6889473510b50328dbb70ae6/...
Just think about website design, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that a non ai design website will outperform an ai designed one. These percentages add up in multiple disciplines.
I would argue betting against ai is your best chance of succeeding frankly (not in all cases but certainly as displayed here)
step 2: find a way to solve that problem for less money than they are willing to pay
step 3: AI???
Detail-oriented work with lots of output that can cover up the noisy bits of thoughtless garbage? Sure, great.
Analysis-oriented work where decisions have consequences over large amounts of resources? Only an idiot would use these tools for that.
Maybe as a conversational note-taker, but anything more and you don't know what you're doing.
Right now, people with ideas prompt their LLM by saying "I know how to make x, how do I turn that into a business?" Anthropic knows that, and releasing a playbook like this is a way to make people who haven't asked that question think to ask it.
For a non-technical person with a small business they don't know how to operationalize, an agentic workflow is a game changer. You might go from only getting 30% of your work time to build and improve your actual product to 50% or 70%.
Can you imagine having a knitting business, and suddenly being able to gauge interest for different colors with a website selector you'd have no idea how to automate? Or needing to close your shop for an upcoming holiday, and having Google and Apple Maps and your website all updated to reflect your closed dates cleanly, without having to fight through every UI? An engineer goes "bah", a baker goes "I just got to sleep two more hours".
I truly think that people in the tech industry do not understand how hard technology is for people who aren't in it.
When it comes to AI, a lot of them don't want to understand because it threatens their livelihood.
This does not sound like an issue small craft businesses have, but something programmer think is a thing.
Businesses need to gauge interest and experiment with options. Knitting colors was my example of that, since I've got some personal experience helping a knitting business.
If you're a nontechnical craft business owner, the work of figuring out what questions to ask to grow your business is absolutely nonintuitive, and it's one of the things LLMs are best at. The fact that it can also modify your website or listing or what have you is an additional benefit; I chose to use that specific benefit to make the concept potentially more legible to the HN audience.
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6889473510b50328dbb70ae6/...