Most companies no longer need massive capital to get started. There are going to be more and more successes where the founder owns the majority of the company, if not all of it. Related, JA Westenberg blogging about one-person unicorns:

…there are things that can’t be automated, and sometimes it’s better to do direct employment to resolve coordination problems. But the tipping point has shifted - quite a lot - and probably in the direction of smaller optimal firm sizes for a very large range of companies.

@manton It’s behind the Substack sign-up so I didn’t read the article to find out if this is covered, but this idea that they “don’t need massive capital” is misleading, assuming we’re talking about leaning on AI for operations. The AI companies are leveraging enormous amounts of capital (and natural resources) to do what they do. Saying you don’t need capital is misdirection; your company becomes dependent on the AI foundation and you will remain beholden to the demands of that provider.

@fgtech That’s an interesting way to look at it, and probably an argument for more open source. I think AI is only part of it… It has been getting easier to start and run a software business for years even before AI.

@manton Gotcha. I obviously made some leaps about the content of the article from the title and your quote.

@manton Ah.. so then I should also caution that the open source fallback is a good idea, but incomplete. The “magic” of this AI generation is brought about by massive amounts of compute power. That is the moat keeping competitors at bay. You can throw around all of the open source software and models you want but if you don’t have enough hardware to support your operations then you are still outside the castle looking at a raised drawbridge.