The Paradox of AI Abundance

AI has created a paradox that most people have not yet fully grasped: the constraint is no longer what you can build but what you should build. For decades, the limiting factor in technology was capability -- we could not build fast enough, cheaply enough, with enough features. AI has removed that constraint almost overnight. And the removal of that constraint has created a new one: judgment.

When you can build anything in weeks instead of months, the temptation is to build everything. We see this constantly with founders who come to us with lists of 50 features, each one individually feasible. The problem is not that we cannot build them all. We can. The problem is that building them all would create a product that does nothing well.

This is the paradox of abundance: more capability requires more discipline. The most successful products we have built are the ones where the founder said "no" to 90% of their ideas and executed the remaining 10% with obsessive focus. The AI made the execution trivial. The human made the curation essential.

There is a deeper philosophical dimension here. When AI can generate infinite content, infinite code, infinite designs, what becomes valuable? Scarcity. Not artificial scarcity -- genuine scarcity. The scarcity of original thought. The scarcity of deeply understood problems. The scarcity of coherent vision. The scarcity of taste.

The companies that win in the age of AI abundance will not be the ones that produce the most. They will be the ones that produce the most meaningful. The ones that use AI's infinite capability to execute a finite, carefully chosen set of ideas with extraordinary precision.

Constraints breed creativity. When AI removes external constraints, the best builders create internal ones. They define what they will not build as carefully as what they will. And that discipline, paradoxically, is what allows them to build things that matter.