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 founding businesses at a scale comparable with mowing your lawn or doing your taxes.
All of this feels just unreal because it is unreal. 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.
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 tide of LinkedIn posting about hustle culture, divorced from reality. This is an extension of startup chic.
"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 process - there already are books that do this (Bill Aulet, Disciplined entrepreneurship).
"nor does it make sense for society to have people founding businesses at a scale"
Maybe not at scale of moving lawns but I'm pretty sure the world is full of nichces that still lack specific software offering or where options of software offerings are limited.
This is like "Uber for logging" or "time reservation system for cat dentists" level of "take existing product category and apply to a domain you know".
So not every cat dentist needs to found a cat dentist time reservation app but I'm sure there are niches withing niches with business opportunities awaiting.
Yeah, and these days it really isn't a big deal to build things; it's much bigger challenge to actually develop a distribution channels and cut through the noise. I think people are just overwhelmed with everything and attention span is shorter and shorter. And that's the real issue - what I am finding now is that again the thing that really works is good old actual human conversation with potential clients.
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.
The barrier to entry drops and so more garbage enters the market. This has happened many many times but there can be a massive and beautiful paradigm shift at the same time. Think about YouTube. Most stuff on there is garbage, but compare the good stuff of today to pre-YouTube content. To be quite honest, I think most of the best media is going straight onto YouTube.
I think a lot of founding is pretty much a commodity, e.g coming up with a viable idea and then implementing it has become rather easy now with these tools. The real barriers are access to capital and clients. From the startup I joined (I'm the 6th person) I see how much the founders personal connections are important. That indeed can't be commoditized yet. But the process of coming up with an idea and iterating on it ? The founders didn't even come up with our idea - they thought of something initially but the investor led them to his own idea - totally different. That's how the company was born. Now the first clients are connected to the investors. Etc.
So access to capital and clients, connections ,that's the last standing moat I think.
It's a commodity in the same way that making music is a commodity (i.e. using production tools to make it sound good). But music today is so much more generic and boring than it used to be.
>nor does it make sense for society to have people founding businesses at a scale comparable with mowing your lawn or doing your taxes
It absolutely does. AI and robots drives the cost of labour down; it's good for capital, bad for labor. If everyone is a business owner then everyone can benefit. A hundred years ago the majority of Americans were self-employed; mass wage labor is a recent phenomenon.
This framework does not sound that much different from what people used to do but with AI agents and coding assistants, and this is not going to work unless you are lucky. LLMs cannot come up with good ideas and coding (if you believe it is solved) is no longer moat especially in the early stages.
So either go viral or go home.
Obviously personal connections, timing, market position all play role but let's be honest - this is not something that can be planned although in retrospect it may seem so. A % of the population will get all of this right many times in a roll but this is just mathematical certainty.
AI has changed the build for sure, it is a lot easier to build now, a lot easier to practice multiple copywriting ideas, do market research ... etc.
There is something that will never change for being a founder, you need to sell, and for that you need network and credibility. It was never about the building, its all about the selling. 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? Sure, in enough cases.
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.
I can't find a name to dig more but the "everyone will get" part is something strange to me. If everybody has the same capability increase, then what changed really ? some would even say it will increase the paradox of choice.. more offer, still the same amount of time to decide, or maybe more AI based decision to match the amount.. so less human understanding.
“everyone”. it’s there, it’s accessible, it’s “cheap”. acceleration will depend on the operator capability. if the final product will make a diff in the real world, it will ALWAYS depend on the entrepreneur, not the tools used.
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 about your own abilities, not that of AI.
> If anything, AI has made it more difficult and challenging because every customer and investor is drowning in AI-generated collaterals, websites, etc.
In many markets, yes. If you're a software buyer, for example, your inbox, LinkedIn, etc. is filled with AI-generated sales outreach. And you know it's AI.
But keep in mind that there are tons of markets (think local services) where buyers aren't familiar with AI. They don't know that what they're reading was produced by AI, and they wouldn't care.
In these markets, if you use AI, you have a realistic shot at being "better" than your competition, and if you use it even a little bit more effectively, it can make a real difference.
I get it, but it is still more difficult to achieve differentiation from your less-skilled competitor in the short term, because they can simply slop their way through, at least until prospects realize that this is a bag of sh%t
If you're using AI for your marketing you're going to get lumped into a slop category, with plenty of other products to keep you company. Only people with AI psychosis actually believe this garbage. All LLM output has a cheap stench to it that's impossible to ignore.
There is no shortcut to hardwork, but llms somehow have people thinking that is the cases, it plays so well into people's desire to be as lazy as possible.
With all due respect this reads a little deranged. To sell something to the masses you fundamentally need a product to sell. I'll agree that how you market the product can be a "product" in itself, but that only gets you so far. If it was never not about the building why waterfall vs agile why velocity why stakeholder why business analysts why meetings why board members pushing for features?
This is like when AI bros claim that AI has changed absolutely everything for their project but the first thing they do is reach for docker compose, react and postgres. Why don't you forget the bloat and have your LLM make your container, vdom differ and lightweight DB?
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)
>As an AI-native startup founder, your responsibility is to know what's in your
codebase, understand any potential exposure vectors, and not ship obvious
vulnerabilities to real users who are trusting you with their data.
This is fairly funny coming from the company whose employees report merging in hundreds of PRs per engineer per day, and accidentally leaked their own source code through a security misconfiguration in a package manager they own.
> your responsibility is to know what's in your codebase, understand any potential exposure vectors, and not ship obvious vulnerabilities to real users
It seems like CYA; with all the marketing about how LLMs will solve all problems it was really surprising to see that, but legal probably told them to go easy on it.
Hundreds of PR’s per engineer per day! They would have zero visibility of their code. Their AI’s would have no visibility of the million plus lines of code.
> Now someone with no engineering background can build production
software that brings their idea to life, while a technically adept founder with little business knowledge can easily produce a go-to-market strategy, a financial model, and a highly polished pitch deck.
I had a bit of a laugh. The non-technical business experts are much more likely to achieve success than the technical experts. They can actually talk to the customer and get the customer to care. No quantity of GPUs and gas turbines can correct for a lack of personality or reputation. The technology is generally not the hard part in most businesses, despite the extreme efforts of certain technology people to make it seem so.
A beautiful analogy for non-technical founders creating software products with AI. There are version control systems, but who needs them when you can name your pdf `n-final-updated-6-16-final-donottouch.pdf (1)(2)`
A serious AI-native founder should not waste time reading this brochures, they should make agentic loops instead where their agents autonomously read and produce brochures for their brochure first, product second startups.
I’m pretty sure the one place people will never believe AI can be applied is “being a founder”.
There’s just too much invested, in terms of beliefs and money into the idea that founders are special and therefore deserve seven-eight figures off of the capital pumped into their unprofitable products.
You’ll see it here in comments. People will defend A”I” applied to software engineering wherever (not) possible, but building companies? Now listen buddy there’s an irreplaceable human genius at work.
Exactly, I always find it ridiculous how the suits, any layer of mid-managment to executives, are so eager on AI 'outsourcing' everything, but they themselves think the 'outsourcing' (if it really works) would stop just before their position.
Why would that be true? Successful founders have to be unsentimental by nature. If you make it harder on yourself than it has to be, you just get killed by people who don't.
Does this include making annoying Linkedin posts every other day about how AI 30x'ed your engineering output and killed graphic design for real this time?
The challenge: Ask an AI tool for evidence supporting what you already believe,
and it will find it. Confirmation bias now comes with a research engine.
Good guide but I think the product market fit portion of a startup is so key that you need no other skills except that to make a good startup. AI won't help you with that portion, only in depth knowledge of a industry or natural product intuition will.
Who knows, maybe an AI ideated and AI created product will be the best app of 2026.
I feel like a lot of this advice is kind of dangerous. How do I draft a tight investor memo? I'll ask the slop machine!
It's kind of analogous to how I'm writing code right now. For simple stuff or low priority stuff I'll fire claude at it and won't look at the code if it works. But for the important stuff I'm very carefully integrated into the cycle making sure what's coming out at the end is just right. I'm carefully constructing prompt loops and validation cycles to make sure what comes out looks like what I want - because I have the knowledge and experience of what works for my specific use case. Drafting an investor memo seems like the second category of thing, you need it to be right. I don't think claude offers much of value there. What's more - if you start slopping your investors, you are going to piss them off. Unless Claude is going to say it has some special data source it's used to train on so it knows good from bad, I think this is a bad idea.
This article also kind of fits in the category of "Here's how to use AI for EVERYTHING!" and actually it would be far more valuable to say "This is the bits that AI is good at, and here's where you need to do it yourself" - which is obviously a position that Anthropic can't hold.
I've noticed that seemingly every single tech company has re-branded themselves as "AI" company. Add a RAG system and you're now AI. Add a AI-chatbot, and you're now AI.
IMHO most founder will fail because leaning to heavy into ai and creating a system where they never experience the friction necessary to build the domain knowledge which ultimately could be the deciding factor.
Just think about website design, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that a non ai design website will outperform an ai designed one. These percentages add up in multiple disciplines.
I would argue betting against ai is your best chance of succeeding frankly (not in all cases but certainly as displayed here)
I think it's easy for those already in the tech industry to pooh-pooh this, as the previous comments on this post have.
Right now, people with ideas prompt their LLM by saying "I know how to make x, how do I turn that into a business?" Anthropic knows that, and releasing a playbook like this is a way to make people who haven't asked that question think to ask it.
For a non-technical person with a small business they don't know how to operationalize, an agentic workflow is a game changer. You might go from only getting 30% of your work time to build and improve your actual product to 50% or 70%.
Can you imagine having a knitting business, and suddenly being able to gauge interest for different colors with a website selector you'd have no idea how to automate? Or needing to close your shop for an upcoming holiday, and having Google and Apple Maps and your website all updated to reflect your closed dates cleanly, without having to fight through every UI? An engineer goes "bah", a baker goes "I just got to sleep two more hours".
I truly think that people in the tech industry do not understand how hard technology is for people who aren't in it.
> Can you imagine having a knitting business, and suddenly being able to gauge interest for different colors with a website selector you'd have no idea how to automate?
This does not sound like an issue small craft businesses have, but something programmer think is a thing.
I've been at a few VC / startup events recently and I was stunned to see the number execs frothing at the mouth about finding a 1-person-ai-driven-billion-dollar-startup. This "playbook" is probably not going to help.
When I see notes like this, I wonder whether every success story can really be summarized and patternized this way. If you're building an AI based startup, what exactly would be the point of differentiation? That seems to be the difficult part
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 founding businesses at a scale comparable with mowing your lawn or doing your taxes.
All of this feels just unreal because it is unreal. 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.
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 tide of LinkedIn posting about hustle culture, divorced from reality. This is an extension of startup chic.
An enormous amount of LinkedIn appears to be more about gatekeeping what other people can do than doing anything yourself.
this is well said. and to me this is crazy and sad at the same time.
"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 process - there already are books that do this (Bill Aulet, Disciplined entrepreneurship).
"nor does it make sense for society to have people founding businesses at a scale"
Maybe not at scale of moving lawns but I'm pretty sure the world is full of nichces that still lack specific software offering or where options of software offerings are limited.
This is like "Uber for logging" or "time reservation system for cat dentists" level of "take existing product category and apply to a domain you know".
So not every cat dentist needs to found a cat dentist time reservation app but I'm sure there are niches withing niches with business opportunities awaiting.
Yeah, and these days it really isn't a big deal to build things; it's much bigger challenge to actually develop a distribution channels and cut through the noise. I think people are just overwhelmed with everything and attention span is shorter and shorter. And that's the real issue - what I am finding now is that again the thing that really works is good old actual human conversation with potential clients.
> 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
It makes no sense, but most technical people wished it could be like that and that's who this article is aimed at
Yes but that means that it is lying in people's face. Really just straight-up lying. No fancy words to soften it. Just lies.
Lying is bad.
As said in Seinfeld: "Jerry, just remember. Is not a lie, if you believe it"
How people cope with their delusion is irrelevant tho.
They're delusional. They must stop
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.
The barrier to entry drops and so more garbage enters the market. This has happened many many times but there can be a massive and beautiful paradigm shift at the same time. Think about YouTube. Most stuff on there is garbage, but compare the good stuff of today to pre-YouTube content. To be quite honest, I think most of the best media is going straight onto YouTube.
We have seen that category in the past, in MLM.
Perhaps now it’s only two levels but still somehow pyramid shaped.
I think a lot of founding is pretty much a commodity, e.g coming up with a viable idea and then implementing it has become rather easy now with these tools. The real barriers are access to capital and clients. From the startup I joined (I'm the 6th person) I see how much the founders personal connections are important. That indeed can't be commoditized yet. But the process of coming up with an idea and iterating on it ? The founders didn't even come up with our idea - they thought of something initially but the investor led them to his own idea - totally different. That's how the company was born. Now the first clients are connected to the investors. Etc.
So access to capital and clients, connections ,that's the last standing moat I think.
It's a commodity in the same way that making music is a commodity (i.e. using production tools to make it sound good). But music today is so much more generic and boring than it used to be.
You seem to be mistaking the "rules" of the ZIRP SV nonsense bubble for the rules of reality.
Understandably so, but still.
The same is true of building a startup based on Rails or React.
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.
>nor does it make sense for society to have people founding businesses at a scale comparable with mowing your lawn or doing your taxes
It absolutely does. AI and robots drives the cost of labour down; it's good for capital, bad for labor. If everyone is a business owner then everyone can benefit. A hundred years ago the majority of Americans were self-employed; mass wage labor is a recent phenomenon.
This framework does not sound that much different from what people used to do but with AI agents and coding assistants, and this is not going to work unless you are lucky. LLMs cannot come up with good ideas and coding (if you believe it is solved) is no longer moat especially in the early stages.
So either go viral or go home.
Obviously personal connections, timing, market position all play role but let's be honest - this is not something that can be planned although in retrospect it may seem so. A % of the population will get all of this right many times in a roll but this is just mathematical certainty.
AI has changed the build for sure, it is a lot easier to build now, a lot easier to practice multiple copywriting ideas, do market research ... etc.
There is something that will never change for being a founder, you need to sell, and for that you need network and credibility. It was never about the building, its all about the selling. AI has not changed that.
> 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? Sure, in enough cases.
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.
I can't find a name to dig more but the "everyone will get" part is something strange to me. If everybody has the same capability increase, then what changed really ? some would even say it will increase the paradox of choice.. more offer, still the same amount of time to decide, or maybe more AI based decision to match the amount.. so less human understanding.
“everyone”. it’s there, it’s accessible, it’s “cheap”. acceleration will depend on the operator capability. if the final product will make a diff in the real world, it will ALWAYS depend on the entrepreneur, not the tools used.
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 about your own abilities, not that of AI.
> If anything, AI has made it more difficult and challenging because every customer and investor is drowning in AI-generated collaterals, websites, etc.
In many markets, yes. If you're a software buyer, for example, your inbox, LinkedIn, etc. is filled with AI-generated sales outreach. And you know it's AI.
But keep in mind that there are tons of markets (think local services) where buyers aren't familiar with AI. They don't know that what they're reading was produced by AI, and they wouldn't care.
In these markets, if you use AI, you have a realistic shot at being "better" than your competition, and if you use it even a little bit more effectively, it can make a real difference.
I get it, but it is still more difficult to achieve differentiation from your less-skilled competitor in the short term, because they can simply slop their way through, at least until prospects realize that this is a bag of sh%t
AI generated market research won't necessarily match reality.
Nor will human generated market research.
And? Spending 1000s of hours searching on Google, reading human-written market research reports, etc. won't necessarily "match reality" either.
AI is a tool. A starting point. A feedback mechanism. It's not the end all or be all.
If you're using AI for your marketing you're going to get lumped into a slop category, with plenty of other products to keep you company. Only people with AI psychosis actually believe this garbage. All LLM output has a cheap stench to it that's impossible to ignore.
There is no shortcut to hardwork, but llms somehow have people thinking that is the cases, it plays so well into people's desire to be as lazy as possible.
> ... its all about the selling. AI has not changed that.
Nor did the web, or mobile, or any other innovation. That doesn't mean you can't build your business around an innovation.
With all due respect this reads a little deranged. To sell something to the masses you fundamentally need a product to sell. I'll agree that how you market the product can be a "product" in itself, but that only gets you so far. If it was never not about the building why waterfall vs agile why velocity why stakeholder why business analysts why meetings why board members pushing for features?
This is like when AI bros claim that AI has changed absolutely everything for their project but the first thing they do is reach for docker compose, react and postgres. Why don't you forget the bloat and have your LLM make your container, vdom differ and lightweight DB?
It's very surreal to have to point this out.
Why's everyone selling themselves as "AI-native" these days?
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)
Even worse if you build your processes around one ai provider like anthropic.
This feels like a “sell the shovels” move. Social media is full of “this one prompt to get rich quick”. It’s the new “one weird trick”.
Build a $1B startup. Make no mistakes. /s
"I will send you to jail if you fail" really makes it work all of the time
I know in which DC you are hosted and will cut your electricity off.
>As an AI-native startup founder, your responsibility is to know what's in your codebase, understand any potential exposure vectors, and not ship obvious vulnerabilities to real users who are trusting you with their data.
This is fairly funny coming from the company whose employees report merging in hundreds of PRs per engineer per day, and accidentally leaked their own source code through a security misconfiguration in a package manager they own.
> your responsibility is to know what's in your codebase, understand any potential exposure vectors, and not ship obvious vulnerabilities to real users
It seems like CYA; with all the marketing about how LLMs will solve all problems it was really surprising to see that, but legal probably told them to go easy on it.
Hundreds of PR’s per engineer per day! They would have zero visibility of their code. Their AI’s would have no visibility of the million plus lines of code.
Sounds super stable and cool.
100 PRs a day? I am sure this is hyperbole but otherwise you have a quote for me?
Yeah this is a Mythos pitch.
> Now someone with no engineering background can build production software that brings their idea to life, while a technically adept founder with little business knowledge can easily produce a go-to-market strategy, a financial model, and a highly polished pitch deck.
I had a bit of a laugh. The non-technical business experts are much more likely to achieve success than the technical experts. They can actually talk to the customer and get the customer to care. No quantity of GPUs and gas turbines can correct for a lack of personality or reputation. The technology is generally not the hard part in most businesses, despite the extreme efforts of certain technology people to make it seem so.
I like how dates and copies are still the ultimate version control:
"<filename>-05062026_v3 (1).pdf"
So there were 4 iterations on 5th of June alone for this document
A beautiful analogy for non-technical founders creating software products with AI. There are version control systems, but who needs them when you can name your pdf `n-final-updated-6-16-final-donottouch.pdf (1)(2)`
This should be obvious but why would you trust what the spade seller says about being an AI-native startup.
Even if you believe AI-native startup is the future (the comments are divided), you would at least want to hear from an impartial source.
This is just marketing material.
A serious AI-native founder should not waste time reading this brochures, they should make agentic loops instead where their agents autonomously read and produce brochures for their brochure first, product second startups.
> Founders who've never written a line of code before are shipping production applications, reaching revenue before scaling headcount
Stats please
I'm sure there are at least two in the world
I’m pretty sure the one place people will never believe AI can be applied is “being a founder”.
There’s just too much invested, in terms of beliefs and money into the idea that founders are special and therefore deserve seven-eight figures off of the capital pumped into their unprofitable products.
You’ll see it here in comments. People will defend A”I” applied to software engineering wherever (not) possible, but building companies? Now listen buddy there’s an irreplaceable human genius at work.
Exactly, I always find it ridiculous how the suits, any layer of mid-managment to executives, are so eager on AI 'outsourcing' everything, but they themselves think the 'outsourcing' (if it really works) would stop just before their position.
You know, I've been fairly convinced we could automate CEOs away since... ChatGPT 3.5 or thereabouts?
Why would that be true? Successful founders have to be unsentimental by nature. If you make it harder on yourself than it has to be, you just get killed by people who don't.
I looked at the PDF and confirm there is nothing of value in there.
Does this include making annoying Linkedin posts every other day about how AI 30x'ed your engineering output and killed graphic design for real this time?
My absolute favorite quote:
Loss of objectivity
The challenge: Ask an AI tool for evidence supporting what you already believe, and it will find it. Confirmation bias now comes with a research engine.
I'm tired boss.
Good guide but I think the product market fit portion of a startup is so key that you need no other skills except that to make a good startup. AI won't help you with that portion, only in depth knowledge of a industry or natural product intuition will.
Who knows, maybe an AI ideated and AI created product will be the best app of 2026.
I feel like a lot of this advice is kind of dangerous. How do I draft a tight investor memo? I'll ask the slop machine!
It's kind of analogous to how I'm writing code right now. For simple stuff or low priority stuff I'll fire claude at it and won't look at the code if it works. But for the important stuff I'm very carefully integrated into the cycle making sure what's coming out at the end is just right. I'm carefully constructing prompt loops and validation cycles to make sure what comes out looks like what I want - because I have the knowledge and experience of what works for my specific use case. Drafting an investor memo seems like the second category of thing, you need it to be right. I don't think claude offers much of value there. What's more - if you start slopping your investors, you are going to piss them off. Unless Claude is going to say it has some special data source it's used to train on so it knows good from bad, I think this is a bad idea.
This article also kind of fits in the category of "Here's how to use AI for EVERYTHING!" and actually it would be far more valuable to say "This is the bits that AI is good at, and here's where you need to do it yourself" - which is obviously a position that Anthropic can't hold.
What's AI-native these days?
I've noticed that seemingly every single tech company has re-branded themselves as "AI" company. Add a RAG system and you're now AI. Add a AI-chatbot, and you're now AI.
I wish hyperlinks used underlines. The worst possible UX is making your hyperlink resemble normal text, especially on a dark background. Sigh.
Here is the direct link to the slides:
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6889473510b50328dbb70ae6/...
I wish there was something similar to this, an online marketing model. Indiehackers definitely need it.
IMHO most founder will fail because leaning to heavy into ai and creating a system where they never experience the friction necessary to build the domain knowledge which ultimately could be the deciding factor.
Just think about website design, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that a non ai design website will outperform an ai designed one. These percentages add up in multiple disciplines.
I would argue betting against ai is your best chance of succeeding frankly (not in all cases but certainly as displayed here)
Are people upvoting this so more people can laugh at it? This whole post comes off as a parody of what Anthropic would say.
Buying a welding machine doesn’t make you a welder
Tell that to certain CEOs that realized they can generate slop code and make their SWE teams deal with the tech debt lol
As someone who uses these tools extensively: they're extremely productive and extremely idiotic.
Detail-oriented work with lots of output that can cover up the noisy bits of thoughtless garbage? Sure, great.
Analysis-oriented work where decisions have consequences over large amounts of resources? Only an idiot would use these tools for that.
Maybe as a conversational note-taker, but anything more and you don't know what you're doing.
step 1: find a problem people are willing to pay to make go away.
step 2: find a way to solve that problem for less money than they are willing to pay
step 3: AI???
I think it's easy for those already in the tech industry to pooh-pooh this, as the previous comments on this post have.
Right now, people with ideas prompt their LLM by saying "I know how to make x, how do I turn that into a business?" Anthropic knows that, and releasing a playbook like this is a way to make people who haven't asked that question think to ask it.
For a non-technical person with a small business they don't know how to operationalize, an agentic workflow is a game changer. You might go from only getting 30% of your work time to build and improve your actual product to 50% or 70%.
Can you imagine having a knitting business, and suddenly being able to gauge interest for different colors with a website selector you'd have no idea how to automate? Or needing to close your shop for an upcoming holiday, and having Google and Apple Maps and your website all updated to reflect your closed dates cleanly, without having to fight through every UI? An engineer goes "bah", a baker goes "I just got to sleep two more hours".
I truly think that people in the tech industry do not understand how hard technology is for people who aren't in it.
> I truly think that people in the tech industry do not understand how hard technology is for people who aren't in it.
When it comes to AI, a lot of them don't want to understand because it threatens their livelihood.
> Can you imagine having a knitting business, and suddenly being able to gauge interest for different colors with a website selector you'd have no idea how to automate?
This does not sound like an issue small craft businesses have, but something programmer think is a thing.
Link to PDF
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6889473510b50328dbb70ae6/...
Claude, make me rich. Make no mistakes.
I've been at a few VC / startup events recently and I was stunned to see the number execs frothing at the mouth about finding a 1-person-ai-driven-billion-dollar-startup. This "playbook" is probably not going to help.
Someone make a guide on how to turn these VCs into marks I can scam with a bullsh*t AI native product.
When I see notes like this, I wonder whether every success story can really be summarized and patternized this way. If you're building an AI based startup, what exactly would be the point of differentiation? That seems to be the difficult part
Copypasta for LinkedInfluencers and VCs
AI psychosis at it's finest.