Once upon a time (like, 2019), starting a company looked something like this: spend six months writing a business plan no one reads, convince a few brave souls to quit their jobs, raise money from someone named “Brad” who wears Allbirds, and then build something that sort of works… two years later.

That’s over.

Welcome to 2025 — the year entrepreneurship officially strapped on a jetpack made of GPUs, generative models, and espresso.

Startups Used to Be Marathons. Now They’re Drag Races.

On his Moonshots podcast The Singularity is Here: AI is Solving Math, Sora Outpaces ChatGPT, Peter Diamandis said it best:

“A friend of mine started forty-seven startups in one month.”

Forty-seven. In. One. Month.

Back in the old days, that was called “burnout.” Now it’s just called “Tuesday.”

AI has vaporized the startup friction that used to slow founders down. Want to design a logo? Prompt it. Need a website? Generated in 37 seconds. MVP prototype? Done before your coffee cools. Pitch deck? Sure—your AI assistant already wrote it and formatted the slide transitions.

Diamandis calls this “the AI reset,” but it feels more like The Great Startup Warp Drive.

The old timeline of ideation → prototyping → launch → fundraising → market fit → therapy has been replaced with idea → prompt → product → tweet → virality.

Apps Are So 2020. The Real Money Is in the Tool Makers.

Here’s a wild truth bomb from Diamandis’ episode “The Singularity Is Here”: the next trillion-dollar startup might not even have users.

Why? Because apps are just pretty wallpaper. The real treasure is buried deeper — in the architecture, infrastructure, and models that make the apps possible. Think 1848-1855 Gold Rush in Colema, CA. Most 49-ers (gold diggers) went broke. Merchants and suppliers made bank.

In short: The diggers found gold, but the tool makers mined the miners.

In other words: the new founders aren’t building apps; they’re building the brains that other apps depend on. It’s like we all stopped competing to open restaurants and started selling salt.

If you’re thinking of launching the next Instagram, stop. The smart move is to build the data pipeline that trains Instagram’s AI to recognize your cat’s left ear in low light.

Talent, Money, and Time Just Got Hit With a Blender

In this new era, startups look less like companies and more like jazz bands with laptops. You need a data scientist riffing on one side, a model engineer jamming on the other, and a founder in the middle nodding like they understand matrix multiplication.

Meanwhile, venture capitalists are scrambling to keep up. In H1 2025, U.S. startup funding hit $162.8 billion, up 75% from last year — mostly thanks to the AI gold rush. Globally, the startup creation rate is up 21%.

Basically, everyone is launching something. Your barista probably has a stealth AI company that just raised a seed round.

Optimization Is Dead. Ideation & Discovery Is In.

Old-school startups were obsessed with “optimizing.” How can we make this 10% faster, 10% cheaper, 10% shinier?

AI doesn’t care about 10%. It’s out here inventing entirely new industries by accident.

Diamandis calls this “moonshot thinking.” Translation: stop polishing your to-do app. Instead, figure out how to rewire the world’s data architecture so dogs can order pizza telepathically.

AI lets you test, fail, and mutate ideas faster than ever. You don’t “launch a company” anymore—you spin up a swarm of digital experiments until one evolves into something humans will pay for.

The AI Reset (a.k.a. The Hunger Games for Founders)

Diamandis drops this line like a prophecy: “We’re on the verge of a trillion-dollar AI reset.”

Translation: everything is getting nuked and rebuilt in real time. The winners will be the ones who build with AI, not just for it.

If that sounds dramatic, look around. Whole industries are being re-coded. Marketing teams are now one person and a chatbot. Designers are debating ethics with Midjourney. Engineers are holding existential crises because ChatGPT writes better Python than they do.

It’s chaos. Beautiful, terrifying, lucrative chaos.

So What Does a Founder Do?

The Moonshots playbook boils down to six survival rules:

Go exponential, not incremental. 10× > 10%.
Own the stack. Build under the surface—data, models, compute.
Design for speed. If you’re not iterating daily, you’re dying slowly.
Build moats around compute and data. These are your castles now.
Partner or perish. Nobody wins this game solo.
Expect disruption everywhere. Your biggest competitor might be a 17-year-old with a GPU and a vendetta.

The Future Is Weird (and That’s the Point)

We’ve officially entered the AI Singularity of Entrepreneurship — a world where ideas reproduce faster than humans can process them. Startups are multiplying like Gremlins after midnight, each one powered by a neural net that never sleeps. According to Reid Hoffman and Diamandis: “the future is entrepreneurship.” (thanks Bobby Roy!)

Diamandis’s friend’s “47 startups in one month” isn’t a fluke—it’s a symptom. The cost of experimentation has dropped so low that the only real cost is not experimenting.

And here’s the kicker: most of these startups will fail. Spectacularly. But a few? They’ll become the scaffolding for the next civilization-scale businesses.

So, if you’re a founder feeling existential dread… congratulations, you’re paying attention.

But if you lean into it—if you treat AI not as a threat but as a co-founder who just happens to be infinitely scalable—then you’ve got front-row seats to the biggest entrepreneurial boom in history.

The Cyborg Founder

The new founder archetype isn’t the hoodie-wearing coder or the MBA with a slide deck. It’s the Cyborg Founder: half human, half algorithm, full throttle.

They dream in prompts, debug in metaphors, and build faster than their competition can finish lunch.

AI didn’t just change the entrepreneurial journey—it folded it in half and crammed five years of work into five days.

So if you’ve been waiting for the right moment to start… you’re already late.
Open a new tab. Type your idea.

The AI is waiting.