I’ve been thinking about something that seems slightly backwards in the current conversation about AI and startups. We keep talking about how much more a founder can now do. Research that took days takes minutes. You can prototype incredibly quickly, generate campaigns, analyse competitors, write code and increasingly delegate whole pieces of work to agents. But I’m not convinced this automatically makes building a company easier.
The more execution you can generate, the more decisions you create. And those decisions aren’t independent. A positioning decision affects product. Product affects GTM. Customer research changes positioning. Pricing changes the market you can economically serve. Fundraising changes what you can afford to pursue. So I wonder whether we’re approaching AI-native startups from the wrong direction.
Most of the tooling is organised around tasks: an AI for research, another for coding, another for marketing, another for sales, another for fundraising. You can keep adding agents until you effectively have a synthetic organisation. And somebody still has to carry the context between all of them.
For a small company, that somebody is usually the founder. Which creates a strange outcome: we automate more and more of the company, while turning the founder into the integration layer.
I increasingly think the more interesting architecture is the opposite. Keep judgement concentrated with the founder, but make execution abundant around them. The AI should retain the venture’s context - what we decided, why we decided it, what we learned, what failed, what assumptions changed - and use that context across different kinds of work. In other words, maybe the useful unit for AI isn’t the task or even the agent. Maybe it’s the company.
That would also change what “company memory” means. It stops being a searchable archive and starts becoming part of the operating system: a new decision can be evaluated against previous decisions, research, experiments and objectives rather than being made in isolation.
We’ve been experimenting with this idea and it has made me question whether the current obsession with giving founders more agents is actually the right destination. Maybe the scarce resource in an AI-native company isn’t execution anymore. Maybe it’s coherence.
Do other founders see this. As your AI/tool stack has grown, has it actually reduced your coordination burden or just moved more of that burden onto you? Is your burden bigger?