[HN Gopher] If you started a company two years ago, many assumpt...
___________________________________________________________________
If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no
longer true
Author : tie-in
Score : 95 points
Date : 2026-04-11 06:58 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (steveblank.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (steveblank.com)
| kristianc wrote:
| Well of course it is, most startups are dead on arrival.
|
| The big pinch of salt I throw in with advice like this though is
| that startup failure rate hasn't dramatically shifted despite two
| decades of lean startup methodology, accelerators, and an entire
| cottage industry of startup advice. It's never the fault of the
| framework, mind you.
| apsurd wrote:
| isn't this a problem of being able to see whatever we want in
| the data? For example maybe more startups than ever are created
| in part due to access to this info. Volume increase but rate
| doesn't. Or maybe magnitude of success increases. Surely this
| is true but largely attributed to internet overall. But maybe
| methodologies are indeed a factor.
|
| edit: Tobi from Shopify has an insight that relates. His north
| star metric is _user churn_. sounds crazy on its face. he 's
| known for that. But increasing churn means you've increased top
| line exposure to more would-be entrepreneurs. Not all of them
| will succeed, but shopifys mission is to create more
| entrepreneurs. Grow the pie. A focus on increasing conversion
| tends to have a narrowing effect.
| kristianc wrote:
| Sure, but if the advice works, you'd see failure rate drops
| over time. It would work like medicine - we have more people
| than ever before, but almost no one dies of polio anymore.
| That's not what we see though, failure rate is basically the
| same.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Arguably that mostly says stuff about average VC skill to pick
| winning idea.
|
| If you have good product idea, the methodology to get there
| mostly affect profit marigins, not whether it will be success
| or total failure
| sobellian wrote:
| Execution is very important. Startups almost never start with
| the "right" idea.
| ralph84 wrote:
| If anything the failure rate has probably increased with more
| capital and founders chasing after the same opportunities.
| Being a startup founder gained prestige and became the default
| thing to do after college for certain types of people who
| before the GFC would have ended up in finance.
| tyleo wrote:
| I almost feel like this is always true. Every startup is dead on
| arrival. Most of them fail.
|
| You've always needed to constantly learn and innovate to launch a
| successful business.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Paul graham wrote about this 11 years ago:
| https://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html
|
| Startups are mostly all default dead. That's why they need VC
| money.
| kdazzle wrote:
| > the bottleneck is no longer engineering, it's ____
|
| 90% of blog articles created in the last two years are probably
| dead on arrival
| kbelder wrote:
| Made me wonder if there's a live-streaming equivalent for
| blogging... some platform that both ensures the reader knows
| the blogger is a person, and promotes a parasocial
| relationship.
|
| There's live-coding, so it's not totally a crazy idea.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| Radio host
| raincole wrote:
| Isn't it just podcast but text
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Your comment immediately made me think about the extreme
| opposite: a Davy Force-like, Infochammel-style livestream of
| a never-ending AI generated Ted Talk, offering delectable
| morsels of tech startup wisdom, but is ultimately zero
| calorie.
| losvedir wrote:
| As a way to get my feet wet vibe coding, I made
| https://seeitwritten.com with that idea. That by capturing
| how you write with all its fits and starts you can show that
| a human wrote it. So, sort of recorded live-streaming. But
| I'm thinking that a sufficiently cute agent could be prompted
| to write something and re-write something in a convincing
| manner. I'm not so sure about that, though, since their
| corpus is completed text rather than text in action.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| In 2020, I wrote a book and livestreamed the writing of it.
| Felt more raw and real at the time but I guess is probably
| more human vs ai these days.
|
| Not sure how to make that a platform, as when i wrote i
| explicitly put everything directly into a book unedited,
| whereas for many people, the editing is probably at least
| half if not more of the time they spend writing.
|
| Or we could just bring back Google Wave :-)
|
| jimkleiber.com/project-35 if you're curious.
| xdennis wrote:
| Is that the original phrasing? Now it's:
|
| > The bottleneck is no longer engineering. It's moving up the
| stack to judgment, customer insight for desired outcomes and
| distribution.
| what wrote:
| That's the same phrasing?
| operatingthetan wrote:
| I find the story of a startup founder who entirely missed the
| developments of the last two years and did absolutely nothing
| with AI difficult to believe. If that actually happened it's the
| exception, not the rule. Most startup founders are way more in-
| tune with AI developments. This makes it sound like Chris (the
| mentioned founder) is behind marketing people who use LLM bots to
| post slop on LinkedIn.
|
| In that case, yes their startup is most certainly DOA.
| thekuanysh wrote:
| Look around, you're most definitely in a bubble. LLMs are
| bleeding edge by themselves. Using agentic anything is mega
| bleeding edge. Having something actually working reliably is a
| tiny sliver of the bleeding edge audience. We have barely
| entered early adoption phase. Most AI users out there are
| Q&A'ing it and they have no idea what agents, tool calling or
| context compaction are.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| I don't follow. Tech startups are bleeding edge. You may be
| over-generalizing here. I talk a lot of my dev friends, they
| are all using AI for work. So if Joe Blow at some consulting
| company is using it, then a SV startup CEO should be too.
|
| >Most AI users out there are Q&A'ing it and they have no idea
| what agents, tool calling or context compaction are.
|
| Again, talking about a _tech CEO_ not a random "AI user."
| thekuanysh wrote:
| - Fair enough but tech CEOs aren't necessarily technical,
| developers or keep up-to-date with the tech on the daily
| like HN crowd.
|
| - The AI jump happened in Q3-Q4 2025 with Opus 4.5 so it's
| been six months or so? Not long enough.
|
| - Most developers out there use AI for their coding work,
| not for re-envisioning business models.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| I know a 60-ish year old serial startup CEO who never
| coded. Now he's running teams of Claude Code agents which
| he used to build a healthcare platform by himself which
| he is now selling. He's already wealthy, just doing it
| for fun. This skill set is the _bare minimum_ for a
| startup founder today.
|
| Going to VCs with a 2 year outdated deck with no AI
| functionality or plans or tool use is unimaginable.
| thekuanysh wrote:
| Yeah I get what you're saying. Sounds like this guy is
| driven, smart and savvy then? Definitely a bleeding edge
| minority who goes where the puck is.
|
| As to my original point I'll go and say that 95/100 of
| business owners out there in the world don't have any
| idea about Claude Code, Codex or anything of that
| caliber. It's too early. By the time that group gets to
| it there'll be tools tailored to their needs, not a
| terminal-based coding agent messing up filesystem.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >95/100 of business owners out there in the world
|
| You keep returning to this which is a strawman of my
| argument. From the start I have been talking about
| technical startup founders, which is also the subject of
| the blog post.
| thekuanysh wrote:
| You on the other hand keep assuming that startup
| founders, even in SV are technical enough to envision AI
| or can change the thesis of their business on a whim of
| technology change that has been introduced less than a
| year ago. It's not realistic. Businesses have systems,
| people, obligations, legacy, etc.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| Did you read the blog post? It seems like you may be
| missing a lot of context here.
|
| I'm not assuming anything, that is my argument. I think
| you could do a better job countering it than pointing at
| the status quo of every business in the world. lol.
|
| Me: 'cutting edge startups should use cutting edge tools'
|
| You: 'every business in the world isn't using cutting
| edge tools!'
| thekuanysh wrote:
| It's not about the status quo. It's about the speed of
| change and focus. While I'm all in on building custom
| agentic loops and building extensions for my pi I have
| enough bandwidth and xp to see that it's quite easy for
| business people to be focused on the matters that are
| completely non-technical. That plus plain sunk cost
| fallacy and blind denial ofc.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| It still does not appear that you read the blog post.
| Going to stop here.
| procflora wrote:
| Your startup CEO acquaintance sounds like a real piece of
| work. Hope he rethinks such an unethical decision!
| thekuanysh wrote:
| I dig MPO as a term and that's exactly what I think of
| implementing agentic systems.
| rvz wrote:
| It used to be 90% of startups would unfortunately fail.
|
| Now with AI, it is likely going to be 98%.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Still better odds than winning the lottery right ? Right ?
| nvch wrote:
| Before AI: 900 of 1000 fail (90%), 100 succeed After AI: 4900
| of 5000 fail (98%), 100 succeed
|
| Like this?
| amazingamazing wrote:
| Not if you're launching a startup based in the real world. Tell
| me how AI will make a laundromat business DoA?
|
| If your business is selling services at 40% margin that are
| entirely digitally based, then maybe you'll need to cut some
| margin, sure.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| A laundromat isn't a startup in that sense. There's no
| potential for exponential growth. A VC would never give you
| money to open a laundromat, you'd go to a bank and get a
| business loan for that.
| nyeah wrote:
| Doordash for laundry.
| hackingonempty wrote:
| You jest but I searched "Uber for laundry" and found
| services partnering with both Uber and Doordash for
| transportation.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Washio was an American on-demand laundry cleaning and
| delivery service. The company was founded in 2013 by Jordan
| Metzner, Bob Wall, and Juan Dulanto, and raised $17 million
| in funding.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washio_(company)
| amazingamazing wrote:
| Was uber a startup? Airbnb?
| jopsen wrote:
| Not being AI focused might mean fewer competitors.
| karolist wrote:
| The post reads like written by someone who read too much about AI
| rather than tried to build a startup with the help of AI that
| they advocate so much. I'm still bounded by system design, UX,
| pricing and feature decisions, if not by the speed of code
| output, by the review time for sure. Yes, iterating is faster,
| but we're nowhere near agentic AI loops spitting out working
| products. Technically it's possible, but then you just spent that
| time planning and writing the spec up front, which you'd
| interleave with dev time otherwise. If the product is a simple
| CRUD database skin, then yeah, chances of success are lower I
| think, but this is not the type of startups the post seems to
| write about.
| jnovek wrote:
| Are you familiar with Steve Blank? What you're describing
| really isn't his MO at all.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I'm not, but this is not a great introduction. It's handwavy
| and makes the assumption that AI dev tools are much farther
| along than they are. I have seen this a lot lately; the
| farther up the management chain and farther away from putting
| hands on code, the more confident people seem to be in the
| power of AI tools.
|
| For big complex real world problems, and big complex real
| worlde codebases, the AIs are helpful but not yet earth
| shattering. And that helpfulness seems to have plateaued as
| of late.
|
| I am extremely skeptical of posts like this.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| I will take a lot more hand waving from the 70-something
| year-old Stanford professor who co-created far-up the chain
| management paradigms that run a good chunk of the economy.
| That context kinda changes things but what do I know.
| antonvs wrote:
| So you're saying he's majorly complicit in the
| ultracapitalist dystopia the US has turned into?
| all2 wrote:
| This is disingenuous at best.
|
| The man is an economist, not a crony operating at the
| federal level (one does not imply the other, and I know
| nothing of the man's background).
| stickfigure wrote:
| So in other words... he doesn't actually use the tools
| he's firmly convinced will automate the building of
| software.
|
| I don't agree with the parent; I think capitalism is
| doing a lot of great things for us and will continue to,
| even with AI. But man I'm tired of these hot takes from
| people with limited practical experience.
| all2 wrote:
| > But man I'm tired of these hot takes from people with
| limited practical experience.
|
| I hear you there. There's a reason I limit what I say
| online. I know very little about very little.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Based on his own arguments a 70-something Stanford prof
| has no more knowledge, experience or credibility than
| someone who started 18 months ago.
|
| These guys don't get to have it both ways.
| pstuart wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Blank
| alex_c wrote:
| I have a lot of respect for Steve Blank, but my heuristic by
| now is to ignore any breathless posts that state "teams are
| doing X with AI, if you are not doing the same you're
| behind".
|
| The much more useful posts are "my team and I are doing X
| with AI". Of course, the challenge there is that the ones who
| are truly getting a competitive edge through AI are usually
| going to be too busy building to blog about it.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Yeah... also, it's just weird. Interfaces are important, they
| contain information and affordances, everything should not
| become a chatbot.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's gotten to the point where, when I see yet another Thought
| Leadership article about software development, I search the
| page for the word "will". If I see unqualified predictions of
| the future (AI _will_ change this and Agents _will_ do that and
| developers _will_ need to do thus), I think I can safely ignore
| the article. Who has the hubris to make such strong and
| unwavering statements about a future nobody can see?
| antonvs wrote:
| > Who has the hubris to make such strong and unwavering
| statements about a future nobody can see?
|
| LinkedIn influencers
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| How come all the talking heads telling us AI has made
| whatever we've learned or built obsolete never point the lens
| back at themselves? I personally thing knowledge from
| entrepreneurs who learned their lessons in previous decades
| is valuable, but if what they're spouting is true it doesn't
| make any sense to listen to them, i.e. these thought leaders
| are desperate to tell you of their irrelevance. Same thing
| for every CTO who tells me AI replaces developers. That's a
| stretch, but if we could do that, don't you think it would be
| trivial to replace your job?
| throwanem wrote:
| Someone is still needed to decide what the AI should do,
| and to harness and manage it. A CTO can do that with
| existing skills, and the resulting organization should
| converge quickly on zero need or want for human SWEs.
|
| So goes the thinking, anyway. It's why my couple decades of
| experience and I still occasionally get to hear from rando
| cold recruiters desperate to "pivot to AI," probably
| thinking they can lowball me by holding my mortgage over my
| head in order to screw three times the work out of me that
| they'd pay for.
|
| I was in this business too long.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| You are assuming a linear future while we are in an
| exponential.
|
| One year ago models could barely write a working function.
| kokanee wrote:
| One year before 1969 we had never been to the moon. In the
| 70s credible scientists and physicists predicted that large
| martian colonies would exist before the year 2000.
|
| If a metric goes from 0 to 2 it doesn't mean it's on a long-
| lived exponential trajectory.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/605/
| bluGill wrote:
| Even if there is a growth pattern that doesn't say how long
| it will continue. Some things can grow for a while and then
| hit a ceiling. Sometimes they are a fad that dies (when was
| the last time you bought a pet rock), sometimes everyone
| has one - you get a few sales of replacemets but no growth
| (you have a washing machine and won't buy another until the
| old wears out)
| baxtr wrote:
| Sigmoids look a lot like exponentials early on.
|
| We can't say for sure yet which trajectory we are on.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > One year ago models could barely write a working function.
|
| This is a false claim.
|
| Claude Code was released over a year ago.
|
| Models have improved a lot recently, but if you think 12
| months ago they could barely write a working function you are
| mistaken.
| theappsecguy wrote:
| Seems extremely disingenuous to say that one year ago models
| could barely write a working function. In fact, there were
| plenty capable of writing a working function with the right
| context fed in, exactly as today.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| GPT-4o is 23 months old.
|
| One year ago, the models were only slightly less competent
| than today. There were models writing entire apps 3 years
| ago. Competent function writing is basically a given on all
| models since GPT3.
|
| Much of the progress in the past year has been around the
| harnesses, MCPs, and skills. The models themselves are not
| getting better exponentially, if anything the progress is
| slowing down significantly since the 2023-2024 releases.
| apparent wrote:
| Seems like the headline should have been "is now dead on
| arrival". As currently written, it fails to convey the temporal
| aspect that is the focus of the blog post.
|
| It also fails to convey that he's actually only talking about
| startups that were created 2+ years ago, rather than the many AI
| startups founded in the last 2 years.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| Chris has been so focused for 5 years that he had no clue about
| anything else going on in the industry?
| taurath wrote:
| It reads to me like the author thinks Chris is an idiot for not
| selling his automation tech to the defense industry
| kayson wrote:
| > Now, before you build a physical prototype, you can simulate
| more design variants, create digital twins, and stress-test
| assumptions earlier and much cheaper than before.
|
| Hahahahahahahaha no you can't. The rise of LLMs has done little
| to nothing in this area because it's very much compute-limited.
| Digital-twins and other ML-based strategies predate ChatGPT by a
| long shot. There are definitely places in hardware design where
| LLMs and agentic workflows will help, but that's largely because
| the existing tooling is utter garbage, and now the industry has a
| fire under its ass to make things automatable so they can build
| their own agents.
| 0xAntonioo wrote:
| I read it less as "every startup now needs an AI feature" and
| more as "your assumptions expire faster than they used to." That
| part feels true even if the examples are a bit overstated imo...
| bloody_bit wrote:
| True, it increases the trials and errors you can have to
| receive pmf
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| "You better be doing something in AI" applies to Startups -
| businesses that are expected to spend every penny as quickly as
| possible, to meet the metrics needed to raise the next (bigger)
| round of funding.
|
| It is also not the same as, "If you want to be a profitable
| company...". For that you need to somehow make more money than
| you are spending.
| all2 wrote:
| > For that you need to somehow make more money than you are
| spending.
|
| I've had this idea of 'business as reducing entropy' floating
| around in my head for awhile. It's a neat way to think about
| the value a business offers to buyers; a washing machine
| manufacturer is selling reduced time to reduced entropy (clean
| cloths), spreadsheet software is selling reduced time to
| understanding (information from tabulated data), and so on.
|
| From that perspective, a lot of AI-driven development is
| failing.
|
| We're still in the phase of 'how do we get order out of semi-
| average chaos?' for LLMs. For ML we're largely past that point.
|
| I've been using this framing as a means to guide me towards
| 'what is actually useful, what might someone actually buy'. I
| don't have my own business at this point, but its still fun to
| think about off and on.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| Building SaaS businesses has become a whole lot less capital
| intensive. Solo founders can go much further than they've been
| able to previously. New startups probably don't need funding
| anymore.
|
| VC for conventional SaaS is dead.
| hyperpape wrote:
| > Founders who started pre-2025 typically have built a technical
| stack optimized for a world where software development was
| bespoke and expensive.
|
| Of all the things that AI has changed, tech stacks aren't one of
| them. The bots will gladly write Typescript, Java, Python, Rust,
| what have you. They could not give less of a shit.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I caught that too.
|
| What is he getting at? How does the code and infra stack differ
| at all between a company that is using AI, vs one that is not?
| jumploops wrote:
| > How can we throw away years of work?
|
| This trap has killed many startups, well before AI.
|
| Now that code is cheaper to write, hopefully it becomes less of a
| problem?
|
| In either case, founders should never fall in love with their
| solutions.
| grtteee wrote:
| It's easier to view it in terms of DCF - the value of a cash
| flow generating asset = present value of expected cash flows
| discounted back at a risk discount adjusted rate. In other
| words what you've invested into your existing assets is
| irrelevant - the cash flows generated by them and the growth
| assets through future investment, is what matters.
| bamazizi wrote:
| This article resonated with me, especially since I've noticed the
| fund raising hoopla's in my circle has dramatically dropped.
| Either investors are tightening the belt so founder-investor fit
| has crossed into the realm of disillusionment
| bluGill wrote:
| It is the economy. Interest rates are up and that will hit
| startups first since investors have other options that are more
| likely to be better.
| jart wrote:
| If it was stretched before it's definitely snapped now. The only
| place I see convincing opportunity is resources and commodities.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| depends on assumptions. thats the load bearing element. 99.99% of
| what was true then is still true. its mostly on the fractal
| churning edges where _hyped_ change happens. things flip-flop
| too:
|
| 2021-2024: good time in US for EV startup
|
| 2025: terrible time in US for EV startup
|
| 2026 March/April: AWESOME time in world for EV startup
|
| focus on fundamentals, not flakey ephemerals
|
| 2020: wise to have smart elite software engineers on your team
|
| 2021: ditto
|
| 2022: ditto
|
| 2023: ditto
|
| 2024: ditto (is this when ChatGPT launched? dont care. snore)
|
| 2025: ditto (what are YC/HN/VC hyping now? snore)
|
| 2026: ditto
|
| 2027+: ditto, likely
| Escafati wrote:
| One assumption that's also changed: small teams no longer need
| dedicated QA. Tools like Autonoma (open source, getautonoma.com)
| use AI agents to generate and run E2E tests in real browsers, and
| tests self-maintain as your app evolves. One of the things making
| the solo-founder path more viable.
| psychoslave wrote:
| If you started something at some point, many assumptions are no
| longer true, and might possibly never have been true at any
| moment.
|
| That said, if you believe universe exists, chances are not null
| that you are correct. But solipsism might actually be right.
|
| In case of doubt, remember that your memory might be mere
| illusions.
| Noaidi wrote:
| It is insane to me that anyone could look at the US Economy right
| now and think this was a good time to start a business. Between
| the war, AI, a pending economic recession (look at bond prices),
| all I see is failure. Maybe a funeral home, but that is all I can
| think of.
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