Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

I have been thinking alot about which jobs are obsoleted by AI.

I think VC’s are probably at the top of the list next to software developers.

The old VC bargain is trading ten engineers for a year or so for controlling interest in the company. The goal is to get some sort of signs of life for investors at the end of the runway.

Early phase can just be AI on the engineering side. Sure, you need a driven software engineer founder to guide the AI, but if the goal is move fast and break stuff, then build a demo, that’s about all you need. Figure that’s a few hundred thousand for seed.

Now, for series A, you could sell controlling interest, or slice off a small release that produces a ~ $1M ARR, then use that to hire a few folks, and bootstrap.

Are there any co-op style incubators encouraging this? I just described a lonely (but capital efficient) path.

This I think is a medium-term path/window only. Eventually the low hanging fruit of "whatever we can do a small release quickly to get $1M ARR" will be relatively picked clean. Sort of like how the App Store boom had things like flashlight apps make a large number of sales, when realistically it made the most sense for it to be a first-party application.

With AI tooling, I think things like "quickly generated dashboard" will fall under this category, which is unfortunate because the only way to tell a well-thought UI from a poorly thought out one is by using it a lot. I suspect we are going to see a wave (already seeing really) of people launching small companies with barely functional products, which will burn user trust (low bar for software already).

For startups, this means the AI-code gold rush may ebb and most users will flock to larger corporate products that "just work". In this way, it follows the VC's with the most money to burn will be able to stay competitive after a few years of drought.

What I'm really interested in that this time they'll need to compete not just with each other, but with other institutions (assuming the software engineer's market rate stabilizes). It's not the 1990's anymore, every business and government knows how valuable software is (even if they don't have experience making it). How will they adapt the lower barrier to entry allowed by AI tools?

On the one hand, sad day for the rest and vest crowd, as well as founders. On the other hand, wouldn't it be interesting to see university or government managed Linux distros?

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