I read it less as “every startup now needs an AI feature” and more as “your assumptions expire faster than they used to.” That part feels true even if the examples are a bit overstated imo...
If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
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Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#32Well of course it is, most startups are dead on arrival. The big pinch of salt I throw in with advice like this though is that startup failure rate hasn't dramatically shifted despite two decades of lean startup methodology, accelerators, and an entire cottage industry of startup advice. It's never the fault of the framework, mind you.
isn't this a problem of being able to see whatever we want in the data? For example maybe more startups than ever are created in part due to access to this info. Volume increase but rate doesn't. Or maybe magnitude of success increases. Surely this is true but largely attributed to internet overall. But maybe methodologies are indeed a factor. edit: Tobi from Shopify has an insight that relates. His north star metric…
Sure, but if the advice works, you'd see failure rate drops over time. It would work like medicine - we have more people than ever before, but almost no one dies of polio anymore. That's not what we see though, failure rate is basically the same.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#33Well of course it is, most startups are dead on arrival. The big pinch of salt I throw in with advice like this though is that startup failure rate hasn't dramatically shifted despite two decades of lean startup methodology, accelerators, and an entire cottage industry of startup advice. It's never the fault of the framework, mind you.
If anything the failure rate has probably increased with more capital and founders chasing after the same opportunities. Being a startup founder gained prestige and became the default thing to do after college for certain types of people who before the GFC would have ended up in finance.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#34"You better be doing something in AI" applies to Startups - businesses that are expected to spend every penny as quickly as possible, to meet the metrics needed to raise the next (bigger) round of funding.
It is also not the same as, "If you want to be a profitable company...". For that you need to somehow make more money than you are spending.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#35Building SaaS businesses has become a whole lot less capital intensive. Solo founders can go much further than they've been able to previously. New startups probably don't need funding anymore.
VC for conventional SaaS is dead.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#36> Founders who started pre-2025 typically have built a technical stack optimized for a world where software development was bespoke and expensive.
Of all the things that AI has changed, tech stacks aren't one of them. The bots will gladly write Typescript, Java, Python, Rust, what have you. They could not give less of a shit.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#37> How can we throw away years of work?
This trap has killed many startups, well before AI.
Now that code is cheaper to write, hopefully it becomes less of a problem?
In either case, founders should never fall in love with their solutions.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
- Fair enough but tech CEOs aren't necessarily technical, developers or keep up-to-date with the tech on the daily like HN crowd. - The AI jump happened in Q3-Q4 2025 with Opus 4.5 so it's been six months or so? Not long enough. - Most developers out there use AI for their coding work, not for re-envisioning business models.
I know a 60-ish year old serial startup CEO who never coded. Now he's running teams of Claude Code agents which he used to build a healthcare platform by himself which he is now selling. He's already wealthy, just doing it for fun. This skill set is the bare minimum for a startup founder today. Going to VCs with a 2 year outdated deck with no AI functionality or plans or tool use is unimaginable.
Yeah I get what you're saying. Sounds like this guy is driven, smart and savvy then? Definitely a bleeding edge minority who goes where the puck is.
As to my original point I'll go and say that 95/100 of business owners out there in the world don't have any idea about Claude Code, Codex or anything of that caliber. It's too early. By the time that group gets to it there'll be tools tailored to their needs, not a terminal-based coding agent messing up filesystem.
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#39I read it less as “every startup now needs an AI feature” and more as “your assumptions expire faster than they used to.” That part feels true even if the examples are a bit overstated imo...
True, it increases the trials and errors you can have to receive pmf
Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
#40The post reads like written by someone who read too much about AI rather than tried to build a startup with the help of AI that they advocate so much. I'm still bounded by system design, UX, pricing and feature decisions, if not by the speed of code output, by the review time for sure. Yes, iterating is faster, but we're nowhere near agentic AI loops spitting out working products. Technically it's possible, but then…
Are you familiar with Steve Blank? What you’re describing really isn’t his MO at all.
I'm not, but this is not a great introduction. It's handwavy and makes the assumption that AI dev tools are much farther along than they are. I have seen this a lot lately; the farther up the management chain and farther away from putting hands on code, the more confident people seem to be in the power of AI tools.
For big complex real world problems, and big complex real worlde codebases, the AIs are helpful but not yet earth shattering. And that helpfulness seems to have plateaued as of late.
I am extremely skeptical of posts like this.