Lasers, Lightbulbs, and Vibecoding
When I was in college I worked briefly with a CEO in Boulder who was a big fan of Gino Wickman’s book traction. It’s a great business book that I’d recommend.
That CEO had this saying: a 40 watt lightbulb can dimly light a room but a 40 watt laser can burn through steel. The engineer in me questioned the later statement (maybe thick cardboard, but steel is pretty strong), but the principle holds true: focus is what yields results.
The current hype wave around vibecoding reminded me of this idea in the past couple of weeks. Building businesses is actually fairly orthogonal to doing the coding work (which has always been reserved for the nerds), it just happens to be that the coding side of building companies was a hard requirement and used to be a high-bar. Your 10 claude code instances can’t sell the product or talk to customers, for that you need extreme focus, creativity, and resilience.
It’s very clear that there will be more software in the world, and that more broadly agentic harnesses will lead to the commoditization of services as we know them. Building and scaling companies is something very different though that requires creativity, agency, grit, and a lot product insight (and sometimes luck) to make work.