GM. The homie Greg Isenberg wrote a post today about how anyone can be a startup founder with modern technology. I want to challenge that notion and take it a step further. Anyone can be a startup founder – but few can do it well.
I see the opportunity with AI as more than just democratizing business making – it democratizes everything. That means it also has the potential to push all human craft into a singular bucket of universal sameness. Similar data = similar output.
Here’s what you can do instead to stand out.
Turning cultural homogeneity into an opportunity
So here’s Greg’s post:
I like Greg’s sentiment but I disagree. AI tooling is still too early/segmented to turn anyone into anything other than a slightly more efficient version of what they’re already good at.
With that said – the foundation of this idea that anyone can do anything will become increasingly true over the next few years
Sounds great! Now the important part:
My biggest concern with AI is that we're inadvertently throwing human creativity into the "sea of sameness".
The core question is: if everyone uses the same 30-100 software to produce everything with AI…
1) we'll get progressively dumber (similar to how a modern human would struggle to sit down and write a dense 406-page book on economics like Progress and Poverty without a computer or the internet)
2) creative taste will homogenized and calibrated to the point where we are entirely beholden to language models/quality of datasets to make anything original / production-ready
I skew optimistic, but it's also just proven in the story of human history how progress is not a fixed modular increase but really just a collective output of people 'winging it" as they go along…
Winging it as we go along
Meaning, there is no particular reason why we depend so heavily on a crop like wheat in our food system, why we depend on oil for energy, why we overcrowd cities and under-invest in the countryside.
We live in the world we live in now because someone decided to move in a certain direction, and the next generation steered in another direction based on the environment and societal structures they were dealt with when they started out their own pursuit of progress and happiness. And so it goes on.
Pulling inspo from Sapiens and one of my favorite books, Small is Beautiful, for this topic, btw.
If we dive head first into AI accelerationism
If we dive head first into AI accelerationism, we'd likely have to course correct because we leaned too heavily in one direction, and we'd be in too deep to pull out. We would have to innovate/solve within our forced framework rather than redirect because it's just easier than going back to how we once were
Just like how people hate their smartphones or terminal online-ness but can't stop scrolling.
Does that make sense? I’m high on coffee in LA and trying to string coherent thoughts together against my eternal pursuit of merging digital utility with analog creativity.
How to break out
It’s quite simple. Be a human. Humans are unique. Machines are not. That’s how you stand out. And what I’ve been emphasizing with our founders like Smokey Bera — organic growth — posting from the heart — is the only effective long-term brand strategy.
No one has access to the dataset that lives in your brain. Unravel that algo and share it with the world through the lens of your brand’s identity. People resonate with real.