@Mike Maples, Jr you nailed it! "Most see noise, or an exception that seems OK to ignore. But one person sees a crack in the foundation of how everyone thinks. The difference isn’t better eyesight. It’s a different way of seeing.
“Notice what other people don’t see.” - Rick Rubin
The classic VC line “ideas are a dime a dozen” was true in a world where execution was scarce, slow, and expensive. In that regime, the idea itself mattered less than the team’s ability to grind through years of uncertainty and operational friction.
AI changes that regime.
We are approaching an inflection point where execution is increasingly cheap, fast, and commoditized. Code, design, copy, analysis, even early go-to-market are no longer the bottleneck they once were. If execution is no longer scarce, then the old wisdom collapses — and with it the framing of what actually creates value in a startup.
This connects directly to the article’s distinction between “painful problems” and contradictions. Painful problems live inside the existing frame. They assume the world is correctly explained and ask how to optimize within it. In an AI world, those problems will be attacked by thousands of teams simultaneously, because cheap execution makes incremental improvement easy and crowded.
Breakthroughs, by contrast, come from identifying where reality and conventional thinking have diverged — where something works (or fails) that should not, according to the dominant explanation. That is not an execution problem. It is a perception problem.
What becomes valuable, then, is not “the idea” in isolation, and not execution in the classical sense, but the ability to:
• identify a real inflection in the world,
• notice the contradiction it creates with prevailing beliefs,
• form a new explanatory model that makes the anomaly make sense,
• and articulate it as a coherent narrative or movement that others can align around.
AI doesn’t eliminate the value of ideas; it shifts the value toward a very specific kind of idea: one that re-frames reality rather than optimizes within it.
If both ideas-as-features and execution-as-labor are commoditized, what remains scarce is agency grounded in insight — the willingness and ability to act on a non-consensus explanation of the world before it is socially validated. That is exactly what the article describes as the monopoly window.
@Mike Maples, Jr you nailed it! "Most see noise, or an exception that seems OK to ignore. But one person sees a crack in the foundation of how everyone thinks. The difference isn’t better eyesight. It’s a different way of seeing.
“Notice what other people don’t see.” - Rick Rubin
This is exactly what I needed to forge ahead with my new idea in 2026 🙌
Thank you 🙏
The classic VC line “ideas are a dime a dozen” was true in a world where execution was scarce, slow, and expensive. In that regime, the idea itself mattered less than the team’s ability to grind through years of uncertainty and operational friction.
AI changes that regime.
We are approaching an inflection point where execution is increasingly cheap, fast, and commoditized. Code, design, copy, analysis, even early go-to-market are no longer the bottleneck they once were. If execution is no longer scarce, then the old wisdom collapses — and with it the framing of what actually creates value in a startup.
This connects directly to the article’s distinction between “painful problems” and contradictions. Painful problems live inside the existing frame. They assume the world is correctly explained and ask how to optimize within it. In an AI world, those problems will be attacked by thousands of teams simultaneously, because cheap execution makes incremental improvement easy and crowded.
Breakthroughs, by contrast, come from identifying where reality and conventional thinking have diverged — where something works (or fails) that should not, according to the dominant explanation. That is not an execution problem. It is a perception problem.
What becomes valuable, then, is not “the idea” in isolation, and not execution in the classical sense, but the ability to:
• identify a real inflection in the world,
• notice the contradiction it creates with prevailing beliefs,
• form a new explanatory model that makes the anomaly make sense,
• and articulate it as a coherent narrative or movement that others can align around.
AI doesn’t eliminate the value of ideas; it shifts the value toward a very specific kind of idea: one that re-frames reality rather than optimizes within it.
If both ideas-as-features and execution-as-labor are commoditized, what remains scarce is agency grounded in insight — the willingness and ability to act on a non-consensus explanation of the world before it is socially validated. That is exactly what the article describes as the monopoly window.