“AI enables small teams to take down giants” may be the most expensive piece of reassurance of this startup wave. Tibo from OpenAI said that, before Astra was made public, it might have been their greatest competitive advantage. After adopting it internally, productivity surged, allowing them to move up by about six months some features originally slated for mid-next year—announced instead at DevDay—though specific projects were not disclosed. This statement gives me the impression that founders are celebrating their ability to hire fewer engineers, while model companies are already using tools they haven’t even sold you yet to build products ahead of you. Can ten people using AI outperform a hundred-person team? That math assumes the hundred people at big companies don’t use AI. At OpenAI, the situation is even worse—they’ve already gotten the tools before you have. You wait for the model to launch; they wait for their product to launch. So I don’t buy the logic that “lowered development barriers give small teams a better chance.” Writing code faster doesn’t prove why customers would choose you—especially when your business happens to be exactly what model companies also want to build. AI has lowered your cost of starting a company—and it has also lowered the cost for big firms to turn your entire company into a single feature.