This makes me think of shopify, who embraces AI and new tech in general. What would it look like w/ their future products
1st: digital employees to improve ops/marketing
2nd: robots w/ irl distribution
I think they're a good example of a hybrid software company in this new age
Boil the Oceans
You know the phrase: âdonât boil the ocean.â Everyoneâs said it in some overly ambitious meeting. Itâs good advice in normal times. It keeps teams focused. It prevents scope creep. But we are no longer in normal times, and I think itâs time to retire saying it.
Artificial Superintelligence means itâs time to boil the ocean. Weâll start with a few lakes first.
I was recently with a university endowmentâs head of private investing who told me their engineers were terrified for their jobs after seeing what Claude Code could do. And I get it â thatâs the natural first reaction. But itâs the wrong one. Itâs a zero-sum reaction to a positive-sum moment.
Instead of worrying about doing the same thing weâve been doing for cheaper, why not focus on doing the thing we never even dreamed of doing? Why canât that endowment achieve 50% net IRR instead of 10%? Why canât a startup deliver a service that is 100x better than the incumbent? Why canât we have fusion energy? Why canât we talk to every single user and have a perfect understanding of every bug in our product?
These arenât rhetorical questions anymore. Theyâre engineering problems with paths to solutions.
Here is what I think is actually going on with the fear: our fear of the future is directly proportional to how small our ambitions are. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what youâre doing, then yes, a machine that can do it faster and cheaper is terrifying. But if your plan is to do something dramatically bigger, then the machine is the best news youâve ever gotten.
If youâre a worker â someone who trades labor for a living â this is the moment to become a builder. Start a business. And if youâre already management or capital, itâs time to go 10x more hardcore on what your aspirations could be. Not eking out 5% efficiency gains. Not increasing profit margins 2% by lowering cost and firing people. Those are the old games. The new question is: what would it look like to build a product or service so good that people would happily pay 10x what they pay now?
The net result of this is more jobs, not fewer. As Ryan Petersen likes to say, the human desire for more things is absolutely limitless. We can actually fulfill that desire now â if we have the agency to prompt it for ourselves.
Buckminster Fuller coined the term âephemeralizationâ in 1938: doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing. His entire vision of progress was about technology enabling radical expansion of human capability through dematerialization. He traced this from stone bridges to iron trusses to steel cables â each iteration stronger, longer, lighter, cheaper. He wasnât describing job destruction. He was describing civilization getting better at being civilization.
This is Jevons Paradox for everything. When you make a resource dramatically more efficient, you donât use less of it â you use vastly more. Steam engines didnât reduce coal consumption. They made coal so useful that demand exploded. The same thing is about to happen with intelligence, with labor, with every service and product we can imagine.
But Jevons Paradox doesnât activate on its own. It requires capital and management to actually raise their ambitions â to boil lakes and oceans instead of drowning them in committee
Thatâs what startups have always been good at: moving fast in the face of radical uncertainty, building for the 10x future while everyone else is optimizing for the 1.05x present.
Time to start.