Designing-Building

The center of gravity in AI is moving roughly like this:

￫ 2023: Generate something
￫ 2024: Copilot with me
￫ 2025: Do a task for me
￫ 2026: Automate a workflow for me
￫ Emerging: Run a business for me (x times)
￫ Next level: Help me manage my portfolio of businesses

How this is playing out in verticals:

Background

2027 marks a civilizational shift from centralized organizations toward individual sovereignty. According to this article we are on the threshold of the "Great Mutation", from the last 400-year cycle of the "Cross of Planning" straight into the "Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix".

Let's strip out the cosmology, and look to tech and economics. AI makes this prediction well-timed, if not precisely accurate.

We're moving from a world organized around institutions, and “follow the system and you’ll be taken care of,” toward one in which people increasingly rely on themselves, smaller networks, self-employment, and peer-to-peer relationships.

This is a social observation. The shift will be accelerated, and actually necessitated, due to survival in the age AI.

This is not brand new. The last roughly 8 years has seen weakening institutional trust in government, media and big tech that has led to growing self-employment, personalized services and a leaning toward greater individual agency. Now, thanks to AI, individual agency is about to explode at the speed of the big bang. A billion big bangs.

The network for the emerging portfolio entrepreneur

The working thesis is memorialized in SOUL.md. The staged customer progression and compounding product flywheel are detailed in the Roadmap.md. Naming exploration lives in the Name Garden.

The functional mechanism is that AI enables individuals to accumulate capabilities that previously required an organization, or at minimum, a human collective organized around a small to medium-sized business. This is no longer the case. AI is engendering a new, individualized creator class. The age of the solo founder is emerging now. As businesses become nearly autonomous thanks to AI, the barrier for founders to launch and operate multiple businesses, each with minimal supervision, becomes possible. The age of the solo portfolio owner comes next.

The global economic metamorphosis will accelerate over the next 2 to 6 years. A new wave of founders is entering the market, expanding the number of small businesses, increasing product and service variety, and drawing consumer attention away from the centralized platforms.

Several forces are converging at once:

• 1.Large enterprises are reducing headcount after years of over-hiring, new AI efficiencies, and rising external competition.
• 2.Many of the people leaving those companies are highly capable, motivated, and ready to build. Instead of seeking another role inside the same system, they are starting AI-powered companies of their own.
• 3.A large crop of new businesses will emerge with little or no outside funding, made possible by lower build costs, faster paths to market, and smaller teams with greater leverage.
• 4.Some of these companies will challenge both FAANG-scale platforms and non-tech incumbents, creating a new competitive cycle.

The protocol needs to adapt as the revolution unfolds. It should be useful today, grounded in proven business practices, while remaining flexible enough to evolve with new tooling and a reconstructed ecosystem. Most importantly, it should be designed for where the market is going, not only where it stands now.

The Losers

Like every major technology shift, AI will not make everyone instantly smarter, more capable, or more successful. There will be losers in the shift.

The old losers are the usual suspects, the passive consumers: distracted, doom-scrolling, and largely unchanged. Their lives may improve anyway, because they become the beneficiaries of even more choice for better, cheaper products and services built on top of AI. Whether they join the creator class or not, consumers remain an essential and inevitable ingredient in the business ecosystem. They are the customers.

The new losers are the political non-builders. These are the people who previously advanced by managing perception, controlling access, and climbing organizational ladders through influence rather than creation. In the old model, they could rise into positions of authority and direct large teams of builders.

That model weakens in an AI-native economy. Outside of shrinking large enterprises, there is less need for people whose primary skill is organizational manipulation. The ability to coerce, posture, gatekeep, and control becomes less valuable when smaller teams or solo founders can build directly, move quickly, and prove value through output. Politics lose leverage in the business sphere and political "talent" largely dies , an evolutionary leftover, like the human appendix.

The Winners

Many of the same qualities that define successful people today (but not all – see above) define those who will prevail, the new winners. They are smart, motivated, resilient and relentlessly competitive. They don't hesitate to get their hands dirty. They're thoroughly immersed in building with a purpose. They are equally focused on longterm vision, taste, judgement and strategy. They microscope and telescope between tiny cells and huge galaxies without blinking.

AI isn't the great equalizer; it is like a newly discovered element (fire or electricity), that when harnessed, exalts builders who exploit its potential. The builders will control and abuse AI, compute, software and chips without restraint. No humans get harmed in the process.

Several aspects of innovation and growth that have propelled businesses will survive, because they are worth keeping. Adaption will be geared to the radical change in pace. Throwing out the bathwater daily, not the babies.

Today, business owners and venture capital investors communicate via informal, private networking, standard templates, check-ins and public blogs. There are some tools and dashboards that help this dynamic: e.g., visible.vc/ , capboard.io/ , Vestberry and Carta Fund Management, Standard Metrics – used by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Bessemer, and 100+ other institutional managers. Edda is another option for firms where the same team owns both deal flow and post-investment monitoring, enriching new deals automatically from Gmail, Crunchbase, Dealroom, and PitchBook data. Carta is the dominant tool regardless of fund size. Others on the long-tail end include: https://littleexits.com and Microns.io

Even with software, firms report burning 500+ hours a year just collecting and cleaning data, because founders send updates in inconsistent formats and metric definitions drift. The tooling reduces this burden but doesn't eliminate it — governance around metric definitions tends to matter as much as the platform itself. source: Portfolioiq

This model doesn't go away. Traditional debt and VC-funded businesses and operating models will not disappear. The crucial roles need to be named generically, because coming soon, one person may wear several hats. A founder may own several autonomous, agent-run businesses, and they may also oversee these businesses as their own portfolio manager. Microscope ↔ Telescope, back and forth. Maybe we refer to this role as:

Portfolio Executive

The model becomes:

A Portfolio Executive might be any of the following:

• •VC partner
• •Angel investor
• •Solo founder
• •Family office
• •Acquisition entrepreneur
• •Holding company
• •Search fund
• •AI-native conglomerate

In many, if not most, cases the roles will be:

• 1.Owner: (founder or acquirer) manager of the operating success for each agent-run business (AI-assisted and/or continuous)
• 2.Portfolio Executive: overseer of many agent-run businesses they own

This single individual needs to monitor and communicate vitals of each business – upwards and downwards.

Product roadmap

The working product thesis, customer progression, marketplace strategy, trust model, and multi-year flywheel are memorialized in the SOUL.md.

In the News

NY Times: America’s Enterprising Spirit Is Booming After Decades-Long Slump

Basics

What changes when an idea person, like a PM or designer, stays close to strategy, interaction, content, implementation, and shipping without handing the work across a hard boundary?

Tools

Tools change everything.

Codex, Vercel, Supabase, Figma, CloudFlare and a growing set of AI-native tools. The point is not to cosplay as an engineer. The point is to keep product judgment close to the material of the product itself: flows, data, interface states, content, edge cases, and the quiet details that make it trustworthy.

Working Thesis

Designer-builders are not replacing teams. They are changing the altitude at which teams can operate. The inventor is best positioned to make the abstract concrete, make the concrete better, and prove how product strategy funnels all the way down to pixels and implementation and back up the stack instantly in fast, repetitive cycles.

Does this list reveal enough clues to identify the working concept?

☺ Tracking well:

• •is an all-in-AI product
• •product could not have existed, nor been realistically envisioned, 6-8 months ago
• •present tense pain point: addresses FOMO about job loss due to AI
• •future tense pain point: will become impossible to manage without a structured tool or product
• •is global – every person, in every place on earth, can use it
• •is based on the evolution of human work due to AI, that may manifest as a transformation in the world economy
• •assumes the progressive adoption of LLM capabilities that currently exist but are vastly under-utilized
• •useful to a vast range of users: every day lay-people to venture capital portfolio managers
• •has network effects with incentives across three distinct personas
• •exploits a legacy model of startup ventures to successful companies
• •has a moat similar in nature to Visa and the payment networks. Promotes a standard
• •costs nothing to get started. costs at higher levels remain negligible to lay-people
• •is inexpensive to operate
• •succeeds financially at scale
• •has security and confidentiality core to its architecture
• •does not host sensitive, confidential customer data
• •founder is advisable
• •founder with experience. Previously founded and built a company to profitability in nascent market
• •founder has worked inside, observed success factors within a global payments company
• •strategy and build process fully leverages AI tools up and down the stack (see tools)
• •no known direct competitors. Related: visible.vc/ capboard.io/ Vestberry, Carta Fund Management > counter-positioning: my AI agent version of these incumbent dashboard tools could cannibalize their own products
• •taste and judgement – more important than ever, since technical development is no longer a bottleneck
• •deep workflow control: embedding deeply into a business's operations so the product becomes impossible to rip out (see next item)
• •confidentiality of data and security requires deployment in standalone agent (e.g., Harvey for legal provides security and confidentiality as a core feature)
• •sticky product, useful, simple, effective
• •peer-to-peer
• •non-hosted customer data avoids legal risk
• •most established companies aren't seeing returns from AI, but we know solo founders and small teams building with AI turn are increasingly profitable quickly without investment. AI's sweet spot appears to be not evolution of incumbents, but a revolution of our economy away from enterprises and SMBs to long-tail founders building products and minting money

☹ Tracking unwell:

• •solo founder without a co-founder (currently scanning for co-founders)
• •founder that is father to a preschooler (involved)
• •founder that is not "messianic"