Sherwin Wu: belief

Transcript context

…So one of my favorite kind of phrases or things that have come out of this whole AI wave is the idea of the one person billion dollar startup. I actually think Sam may have keyed it or Sam may have been the first one to say it, but it's fascinating to think about. It's like, yeah, if people are so high leveraged, at some point there will likely be a one person billion dollar startup. And while I think that's really, really cool, I think people aren't really pricing the second or third order effects of this. And really, because what the one person billion dollar startup implies is that one person can just have so much more agency and so much more leverage using one of these tools that it is just super easy for them to get everything done that they need to for their business to ultimately create something that's a billion dollars. But I think there are a couple other implications of this. So one of them is if it's easy for a person to create a one person... or if it's possible for a person to create a one person billion dollar startup, it also means it's way easier for people to just create startups in general. I actually think this will... One second order effect of this is I think there's just going to be a huge startup boom and small SMB style boom where anyone can build software for anything. One, you're kind of starting to see this play out in the AI startup scene where software's became a lot more vertical oriented, where these verticals, like creating some AI tool for some vertical tends to work quite well because you really lean into that particular domain, you really understand the use case for it. And so if you play out AI, there's no reason why you can't have like 100x more of these startups. And so I think one world that we might end up seeing happen is in order to enable a one person billion dollar startup, there might be like a hundred other small startups building bespoke software that works extremely well to support other types of small one person billion dollar startups. And so I think we might actually enter into a golden age of like B2B SaaS and just like software and startups in general. And so I think that's a really interesting trend to kind of see because as it gets easier and easier to build software, as it's easier and easier to run a company, you might actually just end up seeing way more of these startups. And so the way I've been thinking about is like, yeah, there might be one one person billion dollar startup, but there might be like 100 $100 million startups. There might be tens of thousands of $10 million startups. And as an individual, it's actually pretty great to have a $10 million business. That's like enough for... You're set for life at that point. And so we might really see an explosion in that way. And I feel like people aren't really pressing that in. There's another kind of third order effect of this. or... You're set for life at that point. And so we might really see an explosion in that way. And I feel like people aren't really pressing that in. There's another kind of third order effect of this. And again, all of these, as you get to the further and further out predictions, I think there's a lot of uncertainty. I think if we end up moving to this world where you end up with these kind of micro companies building software that works for one or two people who own the company and are working there, I think the startup ecosystem will change. I think the VC ecosystem will change. We might end up in a world where there's just like a handful of big players that are offering platforms and supporting all of these startups, but the types of venture scale return startups that can really 100 or 1,000x your investment might actually end up shrinking if you end up having a bunch of these smaller 10 to 50 million dollar companies, which are not great for venture startup returns, but are great for the individuals, the high agency individuals who are now really leaning into AI to build these businesses for themselves. I love how many order effects we've been through. I want to hear the fourth order effect now, Sherwin. I'm just joking.…

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