The Idea is the Product

You see a talking head on TV explaining how AI will replace all your jobs. It's always executives and investors. Never makers. Why?

Because there is money to be made in the idea — let me say that again — the idea of decoupling capital from labor is profitable. Not implementation. Not execution. The idea.

Mention that your new AI thing will replace labor and your startup valuation goes up. You can raise money on better terms. You literally profit off the idea of the future. And the beauty of AI is that it's a literal black box! Few fully understands what's inside, which means nobody can call your bluff!

AI is the most incredible thing I've encountered in my career. It is genuinely unreal… at times. But the ability for humans to extract value from AI is now the limiting factor, not AI itself. And that's the part nobody on TV wants to talk about.

I remember the first dot-com bubble selling the same pitch: leverage labor, scale without headcount. That was valuable until it wasn't. This is not that. We are legitimately decoupling labor from capital now. That is valuable. The question is who's building the real thing and who's just selling the idea of it.

Find the real ones.