flâneur

Dougie on X: "Venues, Not Products" / X

x.com · 2,744 words · saved by 1 readers

To view keyboard shortcuts, press question mark View keyboard shortcuts Article See new posts Conversation Dougie @DougieDeLuca Venues, Not Products 5 10 78 11K Most of what is being built right now is at risk. Not because it does not work. Because it can be absorbed. And in the regime we've entered, anything that can be absorbed will be. The software era was an anomaly. For most of the last twenty years, startups could build defensibility out of engineering cost. Shipping was hard. Copying was slow. The product itself could be the moat because only a few teams could afford to build it well, maintain it, and iterate fast enough to stay ahead. That regime is over. AI turns software into a liquid commodity. When the marginal cost of building collapses, the marginal cost of copying collapses with it. "Better UI" stops being differentiated. The supply of competent software goes effectively infinite. Power moves upstream. It moves to whoever controls default placement: the distribution surf

Most of what is being built right now is at risk. Not because it does not work. Because it can be absorbed. And in the regime we've entered, anything that can be absorbed will be. The software era was an anomaly. For most of the last twenty years, startups could build defensibility out of engineering cost. Shipping was hard. Copying was slow. The product itself could be the moat because only a few teams could afford to build it well, maintain it, and iterate fast enough to stay ahead. That regime is over. AI turns software into a liquid commodity. When the marginal cost of building…

related reading