Reflections On 2025 As An Entrepreneur In Residence, AI

The Uncertainty

The pace of the LLM transformation has created a lot excitement. It's also driving daily uncertainty and anxiety for a lot of professionals. Every employee using LLM is enjoying increased productivity. Their managers and executives are too, and they see it both personally, and within the ranks of the folks they're responsible to manage.

Those same managers and execs (and by duty, boards, and ultimately shareholders) also see what they have always seen: labor efficiency gains belong to "The Company". So for a business to remain competitive in a world where one person can suddently do the work of two, someone is going home. Managers and execs are leading that charge—apparently forgetting their jobs can (and will) be made more efficient too.

The Entrepreneurial Opportunity

No one can (or should) assert every industry-altering technology has a discoverable a priori demand. Many are happy accidents. "Pivots" in the slop of modern-day business discourse: unplanned, unanticipated, often undertaken in desperation, and always underfunded relative to their eventual impact. The bigger the win, the more tempting it is to apply the label "genius" to the folks in charge. But in many cases, it's a hindsight honorarium at best.

Visionary founders pivot because they understand their role isn't building a profitable business. Discipline—particularly time discipline—is important. Raising (or earning) enough to operate is existential table stakes. But profit is a distraction from the entrepreneur's actual job: building teams, establishing repeatable process and performance culture, and testing novel ideas to failure.

The barriers to testing new ideas—time, talent, and capital—are the same as they have been forever. But LLMs are compressing the quantity of each required to test new ideas at a staggering rate.

What I See

Where some see a coming labor apocalypse and increased incumbent dominance, I see something entirely different: a potential era of wild abundance and wealth creation for creative minds.

Because despite breathtaking advances in what LLMs can generate, the thing they remain abysmal at generating is a novel idea. And here's the uncomfortable truth no one in a boardroom wants to hear: so are institutional gatekeepers.

VCs, executives, and managers are inarguably skilled at many things: pattern recognition, risk assessment, capital allocation, organizational scaling. These are valuable skills. Any entrepreneur who doesn't think so hasn't failed enough.

But they are fundamentally evaluative and executive, not generative. The institutional layer of business exists to optimize and extract, not create. That's not a criticism; it's a job description.

The traditional startup equation assumes founders need an institutional layer to succeed. You raise VC money to hire a team to build a thing to test an idea. Each dependency adds time, dilution, and critically: opinions of people with different ideas about which risks are worth taking.

LLMs are eliminating those assumptions faster than most people realize. While established executive teams wade through institutional inertia to simply reach agreement about how to integrate AI into their existing business processes, LLM-based systems are empowering entrepreneurs to avoid the skilled labor requirement entirely.

Dario Amodei (co-founder of Anthropic) recently predicted we'll see the first single-operator unicorn by 2026. Cynically, that's a self-serving prediction from someone selling $200/mo Powerball tickets. But as a daily user of Anthropic's products, I think he's probably right.

When a technical entrepreneur can prototype, iterate, and ship at the speed of a ten-person interdisciplinary team, the calculus fundamentally changes. The foundations of venture success are actively shifting from execution to imagination. The result will be more revolutionary than even the most enthusiastic predictions.

Entrepreneurs who thrive in this era won't be people who learn to use AI as a productivity multiplier. Don't get me wrong—there will be plenty of that to go around and money to be made chasing it: lots of "Forward Deployed Engineering" shaped around emerging patterns and protocols.

But the real winners will be entrepreneurs who reawaken to a truth they've always known: the most valuable resource is between their ears.

More than ever, the world needs ideas. For that, the world needs us: The Music Makers; The Dreamers of Dreams.