rprend

This is interesting. Do you know of any examples of successful tech companies built by non-technical founders?

An alternative web where every page is pure state. It contains every possible website. Most are nonsense. But navigate correctly, and you find the one you need.

They’re not lying when they say they have AI write their code, so it’s not just promotion. They will thrive or die from this thesis. If present YC portfolio companies underperform the market in 5-10 years, that’s a strong signal for AI skeptics. If they overperform, that’s a strong signal that AI skeptics were wrong.

3. You are absolutely right. New startups have greenfield projects that are in-distribution for AI. This gives them faster iteration speed. This means new companies have a structural advantage over older companies, and I expect them to grow faster than tech startups that don’t do this.

Plenty of legacy codebases will stick around, for the same reasons they always do: once you’ve solved a problem, the worst thing you can do is rewrite your solution to a new architecture with a better devex. My prediction: if you want to keep the code writing and office culture of the 2010s, get a job internally at cloud computing companies (AWS, GCP, etc). High reliability systems have less to gain from iteration speed. That’s why airlines and banks maintain their mainframes.

AI writes most of the code for most new YC companies, as of this year.

Yep, they call them World Models. Here’s the cutting edge: https://www.worldlabs.ai/blog/marble-world-model

Google deepmind is working on one too.

<1 year old startup with fullstack javascript monorepo. Hosted with a serverless platform with good devex, like cloudflare workers.

That’s the typical “claude code writes all my code” setup. That’s my setup.

This does require you to fit your problem to the solution. But when you do, the results are tremendous.

There’s plenty of developer talent. You don’t see microsoft office competitors because it’s a bad business to start. “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work. I’m sure dozens of people have tried.

I like it.

In your heart you either believe something or you don’t. I am happy to live in a world where so many people follow the courage of their convictions, even if they sound insane or uncomfortable.

Look it's fine to have contrarian opinions that left is right, everything is backwards, whatever. But when it comes to business and money, these things are quantitative and falsifiable. If you have a better understanding than the idiots in charge, then go be rich! If you have a better model for real value, you'll outcompete them. Until you do that, you are playing word games, ones which have somehow deluded you into believing that the most profitable company on earth is not valuable.

Which brands lose money on ads? Why are they still in business?

> consumers have a lot of money that they dole out. More ads wont increase the cut of money

Consumer spending is not a fixed pie chart or a zero sum game. US consumer spending has grown from $14 to $19 trillion since 2020. $5 trillion in new pie!!

Your model of ads is: “I, a consumer, have decided to buy a bluetooth speaker, and the ads push and pull me towards particular brands”. But that’s not how ads work! Ads don’t just compete for fixed spending, they induce NEW spending. An ad can give a customer the idea of buying, and grow the market.

Every greenfield project uses claude code to write 90+% of code. Every YC startup for the past six months says AI writes 90+% of their code. Claude code writes 90+% of my code. That’s today.

It works great. I have a faster iteration cycle. For existing large codebases, AI modifications will continue to be okay-ish. But new companies with a faster iteration cycle will outcompete olds ones, and so in the long run most codebases will use the same “in-distribution” tech stacks and architecture and design principles that AI is good at.

Do you think consumer brands lose money when they pay Google to do advertising? Do you think digital ads have a negative ROI for the brands that buy them? If so, why do they keep buying more? Wouldn’t they lose to more efficient companies?

I think you underestimate how valuable being the top slot on google is. Just the other day i googled “bluetooth speaker” and bought the first result (an ad). One hour of that can net you millions of dollars. That’s why consumer brands bid more and more every year on digital advertising.

ChatGPT is not a model, it is a product. My credit card charges me for ChatGPT, not GPT5. Products have moats because once you solve the problem and become a habit, consumers never switch. Nobody switches from Google, nobody switches from Instagram, nobody switches from AWS to whatever godforsaken hertzner self hosted solution hackernews says is cheaper than the cloud.

Nobody wants the same thing but cheaper, or the same thing but marginally better. You either solve the problem first, or you lose. The first site to ever threaten the dominance of google.com is chatgpt.com! Why? Because it’s NOT just “google but better”, it’s an entirely new thing.

> To me, this is absolutely worthless information. That DOES NOT mean that ChatGPT is in the clear and nobody else will overtake them

Do you think chatgpt.com will be worse the 5th most visited website 5 years from now? I’ll gladly take that bet, let’s do $100, i’ll even give you 2:1 odds. Do you think openAI will be bankrupt in <10 years? Let’s bet $1000, hell I’ll give you 10:1 odds.

Chatgpt.com alone is clearly at least as valuable as instagram.com, soon to be as valuable as google.com, and long term more than either.

Yes you get it. Obviously “writing code” will die. It will hold on in legacy systems that need bespoke maintenance, like COBOL systems have today. There will be artisanal coders, like there are artisanal blacksmiths, who do it the old fashioned way, and we will smile and encourage them. Within 20 years, writing code syntax will be like writing assembly: something they make you do in school, something that your dad reminds you about the good old days.

I talked to someone who was in denial about this, until he said he had conflated writing code with solving problems. Solving problems isn’t going anywhere! Solving problems: you observe a problem, write out a solution, implement that solution, measure the problem again, consider your metrics, then iterate.

“Implement it” can mean writing code, like the past 40 years, but it hasn’t always been. Before coding, it was economics and physics majors, who studied and implemented scientific management. For the next 20 years, it will be “describe the tool to Claude code and use the result”.

Average big tech alternative. Doesn’t solve your problems, doesn’t scale, terrible UX, but at least it’s run by fanatics.

> it’s horrible, i use it every day > the alternatives are great, i never use them

Every time.

They sell a product, not a model. ChatGPT is a product, GPT5 is a technology.

If you hope that ChatGPT will be worthless because the underlying technology will commodify, then you are naive and will be disappointed.

If that logic made sense, why has it never happened before? Servers and computers have been commodified for decades! Salesforce is just a database, social media is just a relational database, Uber is just a GPS wrapper, AWS is just a server.

People pay money, setup subscriptions, and download apps to solve a problem, and once they solve that problem they rarely switch. ChatGPT is the fifth most visited website in the world! Facebook and Deepseek making opensource models means you can make your own ChatGPT, just like you can make your own Google, and nobody will use it, just like nobody uses the dozens of “better” search engines out there.

They do make money on inference.

“Port it to a different language” a language that’s more out of distribution? Bad devex. Store data as an unreadable binary file? Bad devex.

Stay in distribution and in the wave as much as possible.

Good devex is all you need. Claude code team iterates and ships fast, and these decisions make total sense when you realize that dev velocity is the point.

Accurate for me. Accurate for basically every startup from the past 12 months. Prob not for legacy codebases, though.

People pay for products, not models. OpenAI and Anthropic make products (ChatGPT, Claude Code).

Microtransactions are unworkable with traditional financial instruments. Electronic funds transfers and online credit card transfers must (by law) be reversible, and reversibility means cost to the issuer, which means fees for the merchant (in this case Cloudflare). Transactions under a dollar stop making financial sense, god forbid alone anything like a fraction of a cent.

In 2024 Congress signed a law that the transfer of digital assets does NOT count as an electronic funds transfer. This was a huge legislative victory for crypto, which had previously sat in regulatory limbo. The reason why you didn't see anybody using cryptocurrency as, well, currency, and its only use seemed to be as a speculative asset, was because nobody was sure if transferring crypto counted as an EFT, and the CFPB refused to make a decision one way or the other.

Why did Cloudflare choose to use cryptocurrency? They could technically use any digital asset. They could design their own custom digital asset used to facilitate transactions (hell, use Cloudflare stock as the currency), but they would just be reinventing cryptocurrency, but worse, and have to fight an uphill battle to get trust and adoption and risk regulatory scrutiny. A few months ago, Congress signed a law that provided a regulatory framework for stablecoins. These assets are "stable" because they are pegged 1:1 with USDs.

So, stablecoins have emerged in 2025 as the clear winner for microtransactions on marketplaces. No worrying about liability for reversibility. Clear regulatory framework (developing a custom solution risks a CFPB investigation). 1-1 USD backing makes customers trust you more, for good reason. AML checking and sanctions list checking happens at the currency conversion to / from USD, which dramatically simplifies your engineering, latency, and risk requirements.

Google sucking isn’t google’s algorithm getting worse; it’s the internet getting more competitive and polluted. If you magically turned on the recommendation algorithm from 2010 but with today’s internet, the results would be far far worse.

It’s funny you mention apartments, because that is exactly the comparison i thought of, but with the opposite conclusion. If you buy an apartment with debt, but get positive cash flow from rent, you wouldn’t call that unprofitable or a bad investment. It takes X years to recoup the initial debt, and as long as X is achievable that’s a good deal.

Hoping for something net profitable including fixed costs from day 1 is a nice fantasy, but that’s not how any business works or even how consumers think about debt. Restaurants get SBA financing. Homeowners are “net losing money” for 30 years if you include their debt, but they rightly understand that you need to pay a large fixed cost to get positive cash flow.

R&D is conceptually very similar. Customer acquisition also behaves that way

Card network payments are NOT irrevocable after a few days. They are revocable for 60 days. This “pinky promise” is not a technical limitation, it is US law: Reg E for “electronic funds transfers” and Reg Z for credit payments. These are for consumer protection, and one of the reasons why payments is hard to compete in the US. Reg Z in particular is far stronger consumer protection than any other country

1. App Clips meant no app download required- it’s already on your phone 2. No funding of an account required. There was no account required. You do a “connect your account with Plaid” once then the connection is stored in the secure enclave on your iphone. To confirm a transaction you just hit okay then the money is debited from your bank account 3. We were for online ecommerce for specifically this reason. Much easier to deploy a javascript package than a new POS. That said we were working with in person POS’s

But these concerns met was not enough

Stripe has pay-by-bank they are pushing with Stripe Link, by making it users’ default payment method. They get terrible conversion, though if they could it would make them massively profitable. Shopify has ShopPay which means they take home a good portion of the fee on every transaction.

Apple Pay takes a higher cut on payments than Visa does (.15% vs .14%). They don’t bother with pay by bank, though, probably because of the underwriting.

All of these companies ARE competing on payments

There are no countries which limit Visa and Mastercard’s cut. Visa’s cut is the same ~.14% in the US, Europe, and everywhere else.

Apple does not only gain by disintermediating Visa. Apple takes a cut on every purchase through Apple Pay (.15%), which is more than Visa's cut (.14%). Apple probably hasn't made a payment network because it would have to either create a settlement network (which is hard even for Apple, and Visa/Mastercard as settlement networks get less of a cut than Apple does without bothering), or Apple would have to buy a bank and become an issuer. Why don't they buy a bank? Maybe Visa / Mastercard scared them away from it. Maybe they don't want to deal with underwriting and return risks and all of that. It does deviate quite far from their core business.