Run this thought experiment: Imagine The Universe handed you, and only you, the closest thing humans have ever had to actual intellectual superpowers. You could write like the best authors in history, you could code like a 10x Engineer who never sleeps, you’d have design skills to die for and an uncanny understanding of consumer insights. And you’d have a 150 IQ thought partner synthesizing humanity’s complete knowledge base at will.
It’s undeniable that you’d be unstoppable. You’d be able to spin up billion-dollar companies every few months. You’d be shipping products in days that used to take Founders years to build. You’d out-think, out-create and out-execute everyone else on the planet. And you’d love every second of it.
I’m in the trenches right now building a fintech startup and I can tell you firsthand that those superpowers aren’t quite there but they’re also not a thought experiment anymore. AI is the real deal, and the superpowers they grant you and your team aren’t hype.
But here’s the part of the story that you also have to internalize: The Universe didn’t hand these superpowers to you. It handed them to everyone and all at once.
Your competitors got them. The kid in his dorm room got them. The Founder in Akron, Ohio got them. The marketer in Tokyo got them. And that random annoying guy on X with 47 followers got them. The playing field didn’t tilt in your favor. It was completely leveled and put in “do with this what you will” mode.
A world with one superhero and no villains is a paradise. A world where good guys, bad guys, neighbors, coworkers, competitors and random Joes and Janes all have access to superpowers is chaotic on a good day and destructive on the worst!
The Competitive Landscape Got Brutal Overnight
Six months ago, if you were one of the few Founders shipping at AI-assisted speed, you were essentially printing money. But “Day 1” of this new world can probably trace back to when Opus 4.5 hit the market, and since then the implications of “everyone can do that” are still being absorbed across the Startup ecosystem.
I’ll give you a real example. I’ve studied point solutions in the fintech ecosystem that took established companies years and tens of millions of dollars to build. With AI, my team can clone the core functionality of most of them in a few weeks. And our version will be built using modern infrastructure at a cost that’s closer to zero than a million dollars. Any version we create won’t be perfect out of the gate because established companies have years of real user feedback and iteration baked into their products, but we’ll start from a way better place than they did, and we’ll iterate faster.
Will we automatically steal all their customers? No. But could we? Absolutely. A cheaper, faster and more modern version of what they do could prove its right to exist.
And the uncomfortable truth is that every Founder building anything right now is both predator and prey. Superpowers cut both ways.
Building Is Mechanical Now
Every Founder has to have a strong view of what’s defensible in a world where the building process is no longer a constraint. Shipping code is now a “ho hum” process and not a differentiator.
The obvious answer to the defensibility question is to lean in to the hard things AI can’t copy overnight. Regulatory licenses, proprietary data moats, heavy infra-layer training, and brand promises that actually have teeth. I’m trying to stack as many of these as I can because the AI-enabled clones are coming for me fast.
But the moat that matters most is the one that becomes the entire ballgame in a world where everyone has AI superpowers. The moat is having a genuinely informed and opinionated perspective on the right way to solve a problem. AI will happily help anyone clone the surface level of what’s already working. It won’t tell you if the entire industry is solving the wrong problem or won’t encourage you to bet against consensus thinking when everyone else is piling in. And there’s no way it will go to war for the contrarian insight that turns out to be right.
These are uniquely human moves that I explained in a piece called “Last Moat Standing”
The Age Of The Distinctive One
The age of the lone genius is dead because if you’re not a genius, you have an AI companion that is one. There’s no longer a meaningful productivity or intelligence gap between you and the kid in his dorm room. What there is and what there always will be is a gap in taste, conviction, and willingness to bet on an opinionated view of the future.
Welcome to the age of the Distinctive One.
The question isn’t whether you have the tools. The question is whether you have a perspective on the world that’s worth using those tools to express and whether you have the guts to bet on it when the world is telling you not to.
I’m in the trenches right now and would love to know what you’re thinking.
Onwards and upwards,
fintechjunkie