ephemeralCo

To me it seems clear we will eventually need very different ways of organizing, recognizing and ultimately interacting with purely AI-native companies. I don’t know how most of this will play out but I have three concrete ideas that I believe are half-way decent predictions for how it will play out.

I work backward from what we already know: velocity on the supply side of software is going up. Way up. However it seems historically likely that this growth will meet some equilibrium point on the demand side. Just because I can make 100 dinners in one night doesn’t mean my husband can eat any more than one steak a night. We used to call this measure of capacity ‘sockets’ – how many installable units existed in a category, market, customer etc.

So this got me wondering where supply will go because I don’t think generation will stop because of a ceiling on sockets. This leads to some fun ideas because what we’re describing is excess capacity, something product & engineering teams have never had. You start to imagine software becoming more exploratory, fun and narrative-driven. I’m talking about these as traits of the company that offers them, not the software itself. I think we’ll see marketing that look more like cinematic universes than polished company messaging. Something akin to cinematic software, which is to say products that will have rich and immersive worlds around which they exist. I think this has a pretty good chance of coming to pass and is a natural extension of the next trend.

The second thing will be the solopreneur with a very large business. I think one reason it will work is because their personalities will be at the center of the companies. It’s likely we’ll see some borrowing from the creator economy or influencer space where a complete projection of someone’s personality, taste and life becomes the story arc for the company itself, such that they are given public permission to ship tons of product with AI and automate everything around them. Imagine a livestream from the panopticon!

This isn’t a new prediction at all. It’s only a matter of time and it’s already happening in the indie dev space, but it’s mostly confined to celebrity devs who were already established. I think you’ll start to see a new group of people unlocked by these tools. People who heretofore had good customer insight, product chops but were not going to sit down and code. There will be a new group of these people who fully utilize AI systems to build new kinds of companies that are highly AI-driven very quickly.

Lastly, the churn on the companies will be high and we’ll get a new norm of fly-by-night successes that flash in the pan. Little Ephemeral Corps. This won’t be a bad thing at all. The acceleration of a company’s natural lifespan seems a natural extension of the acceleration of everything else around it. Maybe it is an evolution of the great unbundling we’ve been living through for the past decade. More atomization on the product side accompanied by richer storytelling on the marketing .

Still many open questions. How does legal liability work? What are customer expectations of quality? Support? What will the boundaries of the firm look like when the marginal cost of a new competency is near zero? What happens to token costs when the frontiers go public? Will local models play a bigger role and do hardware costs become prohibitive over time? We’ll find out together, but I do think one of the first things we’ll see is solo builders start to scaffold big product offerings around themselves in the same way we see influencers position themselves in categories like travel, fitness, etc.

Have a great holiday weekend!