AI Amplifies Agency and Ambition

I’ve been in this game a long time.

Long enough to remember when “AI” was a term you only heard in university labs and sci-fi novels. In the circles I ran in, on Wall Street and later in the world of Big Tech, we called it “machine learning.” It was our secret weapon, a quantitative edge that could predict market shifts or user behavior with uncanny accuracy. We built complex models that felt like magic, but they were brittle, expensive, and required a small army of PhDs to maintain.

Sarah and Matt McDonagh

Today, that magic is being democratized at a pace that even I find staggering. The same power that we used to corner markets is now available to anyone with a laptop and an internet connection. And it’s creating a seismic shift, a great bifurcation in the professional landscape.

On one side, you have the builders, the creators, the founder-types.

These are what I call the high-agency individuals. These are the people who don’t wait for permission. They see a problem and immediately start hacking together a solution. For them, AI is not just a tool; it’s a force multiplier, a tireless partner that helps them build, test, improve, and distribute their creations at a velocity that was unimaginable just a few years ago. They are achieving new heights of productivity and versatility, creating entire companies from their standing desks.

On the other side, you have those who see work as a transaction. They trade their time for a paycheck, performing tasks assigned to them with little passion or initiative. They are the cogs in a machine, and they are finding that their cogs are becoming increasingly obsolete. The tasks they perform, the reports they generate, the analyses they conduct—all can now be done faster, cheaper, and often better by an AI. They are not just falling behind; they are in danger of being left out of the new economy altogether. You could say they aren’t living the smartest life plan, given what we see coming from AI.

This isn’t a dystopian prediction; it’s an observation from the front lines of technological advancement. As an investor, I see it every day in the pitches I receive and the companies I fund. The future belongs to those who can harness the power of AI to amplify their own agency.

And for those who can’t, or won’t, the future looks bad.

Building: From Zero to One at the Speed of Thought

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and in the world of startups, that first step is building the product. This has always been the most resource-intensive phase, a gauntlet of coding, designing, and engineering that could drain a seed round before the first user ever logged on. I’ve seen countless promising ideas wither on the vine because the founders couldn’t build their vision fast enough or afford the talent to do it for them.

AI has fundamentally altered this equation. For the high-agency founder, it’s like having a team of world-class engineers on call 24/7. Need a landing page? Describe it to a large language model, and you’ll have the HTML and CSS in seconds. Need a backend database? An AI can architect the schema and write the code to manage it. From generating boilerplate code to debugging complex algorithms, AI has become the ultimate co-pilot for the technical founder.

But its impact is even more profound for the non-technical founder. In the past, a great idea was worthless without the ability to execute it. You were at the mercy of finding a technical co-founder or outsourcing to an expensive development shop. I used to love getting approached by business people trying to materialize their idea. What a great negotiating position, given I could ACTUALLY materialize what they wanted.

Now, with tools that can turn natural language prompts into functional code, the barrier between idea and execution is dissolving. Now any builder can materialize what they want. I’m seeing founders with backgrounds in art history and philosophy building sophisticated applications that would have required a team of senior engineers just a few years ago.

This is where the bifurcation becomes stark.

The high-agency individual, driven by a relentless desire to create, will use these tools to their absolute limit. They will learn the art of prompt engineering, figuring out how to coax the best possible output from the AI. They will stitch together different AI services, creating a bespoke development pipeline that is perfectly tailored to their needs. They are not just building a product… they are building a machine that builds the product.

Meanwhile, the low-agency individual remains a passive consumer. They might use an AI to write an email or summarize a document, but they don’t see it as a tool for creation. They are waiting for the IT department to roll out a new piece of software, for their manager to assign them a task. The idea of building something from scratch, of wrestling with an AI to bring a vision to life, is completely alien to them. They are stuck in the world of defined tasks and prescribed workflows, a world that is rapidly shrinking.

Testing: The End of Guesswork

Once you’ve built your product, you need to know if it’s any good. This is the testing phase, a crucial and often brutal part of the startup journey. It’s where your beautiful idea collides with the messy reality of the market. In the past, this was a slow and expensive process. You’d run A/B tests, conduct user surveys, and pore over analytics data, trying to decipher the tea leaves of user behavior.

In short: testing sucks.

AI has transformed testing from a reactive, archaeological dig into a proactive, predictive science. For the high-agency founder, AI is an oracle that can see around corners. Instead of just analyzing what users have done, AI can predict what they will do. By feeding user data into a machine learning model, you can identify patterns and correlations that would be invisible to the human eye. You can predict which users are likely to churn, which features are most likely to drive engagement, and which pricing model is most likely to maximize revenue.

But it goes even deeper than that. AI can simulate entire user populations, allowing you to test new features and ideas in a virtual sandbox before you ever write a line of code. You can create synthetic user personas and see how they interact with your product, identifying potential roadblocks and areas of confusion before they ever impact a real user. This ability to test in silico is a game-changer, allowing for a level of iteration and refinement that was previously impossible.

The high-agency founder embraces this new paradigm.

They are constantly feeding the AI new data, fine-tuning their models, and running new simulations.

They see their product not as a static object, but as a living organism that is constantly evolving in response to user feedback, both real and simulated.

They are not just testing their product; they are co-evolving with it.

The low-agency individual, on the other hand, is still stuck in the world of spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. They wait for the weekly analytics report, look at the top-line numbers, and make a few superficial observations. They are not engaging with the data on a deep level; they are simply reporting on it. The idea of building a predictive model or running a user simulation is not even on their radar.

They are playing checkers while the high-agency founder is playing a game of multi-dimensional chess that they don’t even know exists.

Improving: The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection

In the digital world, there is no such thing as a finished product.

There is only a constant process of improvement, a relentless pursuit of perfection. This is where the best companies separate themselves from the pack. They are never satisfied, never complacent. They are always looking for ways to make their product faster, smarter, and more delightful for their users.

AI is the ultimate engine for this process of continuous improvement. It can analyze user feedback at a scale and depth that is simply not possible for a human team. It can scan through thousands of support tickets, app store reviews, and social media comments, identifying common themes and emerging issues in real-time. It can even analyze screen recordings of user sessions, pinpointing the exact moments where users get stuck or frustrated.

This firehose of qualitative data, when combined with the quantitative data from the testing phase, provides a holistic view of the user experience that is both wide and deep. For the high-agency founder, this is gold. They can use this information to prioritize their product roadmap, focusing on the features and fixes that will have the greatest impact on user satisfaction and retention.

AI can play an active role in the improvement process itself.

AI can suggest design improvements, optimize user flows, and even write the code to implement these changes. With the rise of foundational models and other avenues toward generative AGI, we are moving towards a future where the product can literally improve itself, adapting and evolving in response to user behavior without any human intervention.

The high-agency founder is at the forefront of this revolution. They are building feedback loops between their users, their AI, and their development team that are getting tighter and faster every day. They are creating a culture of continuous improvement that is powered by data and amplified by AI.

The low-agency individual, meanwhile, is stuck in the world of quarterly planning cycles and annual performance reviews. They are focused on hitting their KPIs and avoiding mistakes, not on delighting users or pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. They see improvement as a series of discrete projects, not as a continuous, organic process. They are polishing the brass on the Titanic, while the high-agency founder is building a fleet of self-improving lifeboats.

Distributing: Finding Your Tribe in a World of Noise

You can build the best product in the world, but if no one knows about it, you don’t have a business. This is the challenge of distribution, of cutting through the noise and finding your tribe. In the past, this was a game of brute force. You’d buy ads, hire a PR firm, and carpet-bomb the internet with your message, hoping that some of it would stick.

AI has turned distribution from a carpet bomb into a laser-guided missile. It allows you to identify and target your ideal customers with a level of precision that is almost frightening. By analyzing demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data, AI can build a detailed profile of your perfect user and then find them wherever they are on the internet.

But it’s not just about finding customers. It’s about creating them. AI can generate an endless stream of personalized marketing content, from ad copy and email newsletters to social media posts and video scripts. It can tailor the message to the individual, speaking to their specific pain points and desires in a way that feels authentic and resonant.

The high-agency founder uses these tools to build a distribution machine that is as sophisticated as their product. They are constantly experimenting with new channels, new messaging, and new creative. They are using AI to A/B test their marketing campaigns at a massive scale, optimizing for conversions with a ruthless efficiency.

They are not just finding their tribe, they are building a self-charging movement that gets bigger and more engaged with time, and incredible amounts of leverage.

The low-agency individual, on the other hand, is still relying on the old playbook. They are buying banner ads that no one clicks on, sending out generic email blasts that go straight to the spam folder, and posting bland updates on social media that get lost in the feed. They are shouting into the void, while the high-agency founder is having a one-on-one conversation with millions of potential customers at once.

Succeeding: The New Definition of a Unicorn

In the old world, success was defined by scale.

The goal was to build a massive organization, with thousands of employees and sprawling office campuses.

The unicorn was a company that had achieved a billion-dollar valuation, a symbol of its dominance in the market.

In the new world, success is defined by leverage.

The goal is to build a small, agile team that can have an outsized impact on the world. The new unicorn is not a company with a thousand employees, but a company with a handful of high-agency creative disciplined joyful warriors and an army of AI assistants. It’s a company that can generate billions of dollars in revenue with a fraction of the overhead of a traditional corporation.

I am building one of these right now:

https://alexion.ai/

The high-agency founder is not just using AI to build a better product... they are using it to build a better kind of company. They are creating organizations that are more nimble, more efficient, and more resilient than their legacy competitors.

The low-agency individual, trapped in the structures of the old world, is unable to compete.

They are burdened by bureaucracy, slowed down by meetings, and constrained by a culture that values compliance over creativity.

They are the foot soldiers of an army that is being rendered obsolete by a new form of warfare.

As an investor, I am no longer looking for the next Google or Facebook.

I am looking for the 10-person unicorn, and the solo founder who can use AI to achieve what used to take a thousand people. I am looking for high-agency mega minds with bigger hearts who are not just adapting to the future, but are actively building it.

The singularity happened already. It took a small crack in our society and exploded it into a canyon-sized divide, and I know which side I’m betting on.

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