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The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

claude.com

121–130 of 183 posts

Re: The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

#121
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assumption: now everyone can do more of the above. The final line is still selling. So everyone will get to the sales part, FASTER. Triage will still happen at this stage, regardless of AI. You won’t be able to avoid this triage, regardless of how fast you get there.

By that logic, same can be said about code. So, ig everyone “gets there” equally fast, then nobody has an advantage

The difference is the destination. Me crunching code with llms vs you doing the same thing will lead both of us to different places(let’s say equally fast for the sake of the conversation). What will set us apart in the end is who will actually sell it, and that’s llm-independent.

Re: The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

#122
post #6

Feels like a category error. It's a slide deck telling people what a product can do (that's a normal thing to release for a company), but the thing it tries to sell you on is building your own business based on their tool. Which makes no sense the way they sell it, because "founding a business" is no standard process that could be formalized in a way like that, nor does it make sense for society to have people foundi…

Welcome to the world of companies founded by business school grads. No soul, no moat, just an endless cycle of KPIs and billion-dollar exits to PE.

Come on, get out of here with this “only true programmers can found a real company”

Such gatekeeping.

Re: The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

#123
It's nice to see an explanation of how they think you should use Claude for a host of different job functions / aspects of building a business, but the tone makes it seem like founding a startup is something you wake up one morning and just decide to do instead of, say, going to the park. Over coffee, you ask Claude about your idea and when it tells you "you're a genius" you're off. That's silly in so many ways. Statements like this "Validation cycles that used to take months now take afternoons" have an element of truth but ring with false promise.

And that relates to the lack of timelines and focus on how long things took around 2020 BC, that is Before Claude. Building a startup isn't like having a lemonade stand as a kid where you just don't bother to do it if you forget to buy lemons or it's rainy or something more fun comes along. There's a significant compound interest element to startups that's easy to overlook. Your codebase grows over time and so does your feature set and that collection of features attracts customers in a way one thing might not. You learn as go, of course, too.

This seems particularly relevant to the GTM section, which I was particularly amused by since that's what I'm focused on right now. It's a long game. Your blog post doesn't get found by anyone in Google until you've built up your SEO mojo, your LinkedIn post isn't read without the followers you need to accumulate and your content has to get engagement for people to see it even then, you don't start off line with a million followers on X, etc.

Re: The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

#124
post #6

Feels like a category error. It's a slide deck telling people what a product can do (that's a normal thing to release for a company), but the thing it tries to sell you on is building your own business based on their tool. Which makes no sense the way they sell it, because "founding a business" is no standard process that could be formalized in a way like that, nor does it make sense for society to have people foundi…

It makes sense if you think of 'founder' as an identity like 'influencer', rather than 'someone actually seriously founding a business'; just as with influencers, some people will make a lot of money doing it for real, but many, many more will post enthusiastically on social media, living the aesthetic. A lot of people already treat being a founder/entrepreneur as who they are, not what they do--witness the endless t…

They sell decorations, refreshment, cakes, costumes, games, and invitations for Founder Cosplay Parties.

Re: The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

#125
post #83
post #6

Feels like a category error. It's a slide deck telling people what a product can do (that's a normal thing to release for a company), but the thing it tries to sell you on is building your own business based on their tool. Which makes no sense the way they sell it, because "founding a business" is no standard process that could be formalized in a way like that, nor does it make sense for society to have people foundi…

"Founding cannot be a commodity. If it is, you have no moat or point, meaning you instantly collapse again, because you are an interchangeable commodity." IMHO you still need to find the product and PMF There are bunch of books startup world recommends which sort of all start from the principle of product, users, traction. This is sort of scaffolding around that. It's not entirely insane to try to formalize this proc…

> Uber for logging

Lumberjack gig economy?

Re: The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI has not changed that. But it has. AI can help you do market research, develop buyer personas, evaluate potential customers, create, analyze and enrich prospect lists, evaluate marketing channels, create ad copy, write sales scripts, think through objections and how to respond, etc. Will it turn you into Jordan Belfort? No. Will it be 100% successful or effective? No. But can it help enough to make a difference?…

If anything, AI has made it more difficult and challenging because every customer and investor is drowning in AI-generated collaterals, websites, etc. The situation is dire in the academic world, where both the applicants and the reviewers now rely so heavily on AI that both publishing and financing has turned into a lottery. I am positive this will settle down at some point, but the difference will always remain abo…

The same thing happened in other businesses where it became easier than ever to put out content or product, but harder to break through because of all the saturation.

Re: The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

#127
post #6

Feels like a category error. It's a slide deck telling people what a product can do (that's a normal thing to release for a company), but the thing it tries to sell you on is building your own business based on their tool. Which makes no sense the way they sell it, because "founding a business" is no standard process that could be formalized in a way like that, nor does it make sense for society to have people foundi…

Their argument on page 10 is that now agentic coding reduces the effort of writing code there will be far more failures unless you validate the idea properly. We are actually seeing that in that the number of apps on the app stores is increasing but usage is not increasing. Some would argue that the right process will lead to the right results.

> there will be far more failures unless you validate the idea properly

You are exactly correct! You're very insightful to see that AI is perfect for validating ideas. It's not just sucking up, it's swallowing. Would you like to delve into coding up a Synchopancy as a Service web site?

Re: The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

#129
post #39

Especially as someone outside the US, building a startup on AI sounds like a bad idea. Some AI company fails to pay their bribes on time, or your country doesn't cede territory to the US president, the AI gets yoinked and you are left with Mistral or Qwen. (Technically that also applies to MS Teams, Google and so on and not just AI)

The platform risk for people outside the US using US based AI products is enormous, as we just learned when Fable got yoinked.

Re: The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

#130
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Founding cannot be a commodity. If it is, you have no moat or point, meaning you instantly collapse again, because you are an interchangeable commodity." IMHO you still need to find the product and PMF There are bunch of books startup world recommends which sort of all start from the principle of product, users, traction. This is sort of scaffolding around that. It's not entirely insane to try to formalize this proc…

> Uber for logging Lumberjack gig economy?

Interested.
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