Great features, not products, leveraging found productivity, and the era where we can no longer believe our eyes. — Great features, not products, leveraging found productivity, and the era where we can no longer believe our eyes.⁠↗

The viability of AI-first products as stand-alone companies will rely on data moats, privacy preferences for consumers and enterprises, developer ecosystems, and GTM advantages.

We’re seeing a lot of “great features, not products” emerge in the start-up ecosystem. Certainly with Large Language Models and “text to media”, it feels like everyone is creating interfaces on these APIs with some degree of prompt augmentation underneath and launching them as products.

The ultimate red flags for me are (1) when prompt augmentation is the core differentiator, (2) lack of a network effect (whether developing a self-improving core and proprietary dataset, or in how product grows and retains users) (3) lack of a step-function re-imagination of a core workflow, and (4) failing to apply the traditional values of businesses I believe in - the importance of design and product sensibility, alongside a series of other factors (aka the tech won’t cut it alone)

The apps that do become companies will have a proprietary growing data source, unlock network effects, reimagine a workflow for a particular market of underserved customers, and/or will enable consumers or enterprises to leverage their own data so the model becomes infinitely more personalized and indispensable as you use it.

Assuming equal access to powerful AI tools, the work we do will become higher order work. Edison’s famous quip, ““genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” was true in a world where the work to pursue ideas was extremely burdensome and expensive. As AI changes the equation, will ideas become more important and the work required less of a moat? The “workflow” to execute ideas and coordinate actions has been the underpinning of organizational design and the core principle of enterprise software for decades. Now, as workflow itself is reduced and optimized by a step-function, we have an opportunity to reimagine what humans do and who we hire to do it. What types of human jobs will become MORE important in the modern organization of tomorrow?

I foresee a resurgence of intrigue into the softer and more distinguishing elements of brands and products - new ways of telling a brand story, more “small things that make a big difference” impacting how customers feel about a product, and entirely new practices driven by consumer psychology. In such a world, qualitative skills, psychology, hospitality, emotional intelligence (EQ), and other non-scalable talents will not only become more in demand, but a more central part of a company’s secret sauce.

CREATIVE LITERACY is probably 10x more important than knowing calculus or memorizing state capitols in a world where all information - and how the dots connect - is instantly accessible to us. How we educate students - and allocate our human brain power - will fundamentally change. What if our extra capacity of energy and brain power went to creativity - both the creation and consumption sides of the equation? Imagine if everyone knew the art of video editing, took up the art of photography, or felt creatively confident enough to paint or conceive wild prompts for generative creativity tools. I can imagine a world with 1000x more movies, music, live artist exhibitions, and new genres of creativity we can only imagine. Perhaps we are entering “the era of storytelling” - where every brand and person’s story is told in extraordinary ways for the rest of us to listen and watch? We will all have more creative confidence and be outfitted to move people emotionally.