This year, I had to shut down my autonomous restaurant startup Mezli — despite a successful launch — after I was unable to raise the money we needed to scale up.
This year, I’ve also re-entered the world of AI, which I’ve been away from since leaving Stanford in 2020. I’m now working on a new workflow automation startup and have gotten very excited about the opportunities created by recent advances in AI.
However, the emergence of true artificial intelligence is also shaping up to be the fastest-ever large economic and social change in human history, and tracing how it may reshape business and society is both intellectually interesting and strategically important for entrepreneurs (and just about everyone else, for that matter).
While chewing on the lessons I’ve learned from shutting down a hardware startup and re-entering the world of AI, I’ve summarized my thoughts into three essays, which I hope can be useful to the startup community and spark an interesting conversation:
A summary of my arguments is as follows:
It’s likely that AI is now only a small leap away from becoming as good as humans at most intellectual tasks. Even if that’s not the case, its current capabilities are already good enough to do broad swathes of knowledge work that are currently done by humans.
So, we’re likely entering an era of knowledge work automation that may parallel the last 200 years of physical work automation, but it’ll likely happen much faster this time. We’ll likely see far fewer people doing analytical work over the next ~20 years, just as fewer and fewer people did agricultural and other manual work over the past ~200.
This automation of knowledge work is likely to reduce the software industry to a shadow of its former self, as programming will become largely automated.
However, there are many opportunities to build software startups right now, and software presents a uniquely good opportunity for first-time founders to build companies that reward good execution and provide quick feedback.
Hardware companies, on the other hand, are very difficult for first-time founders because their unavoidable capital requirements make them vulnerable to running out of money, and because their slow cycle times make for a slow education in entrepreneurship.
So, I highly encourage today’s aspiring entrepreneurs to focus on software, especially because we may be entering the last era when the software industry, and software entrepreneurship, exists in its present form.
That said, given the rapid changes in AI capabilities, I also think it’s especially important for today’s AI founders to keep an eye on the long-term competitive advantages their companies develop, as technology built on top of today’s AI may become infinitely easier to build on top of tomorrow’s AI, negating the technical defensibility of much of the work being done by startups today. Other forms of defensibility are likely to be more important in the future.
I welcome all comments, especially those that point out things I missed or refute a claim I’ve made. Hopefully we can all learn from the debate.
Alex Kolchinski 
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