One post tagged with "defensibility"

Here's a test every AI startup founder should take: if OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic all shipped exactly what you're building tomorrow, would your users stay? If the honest answer is no, you haven't built a product — you've built a feature on borrowed time.

Between 2023 and early 2025, roughly 3,800 AI startups shut down — a 27% failure rate — with another 1,800 closing in early 2026. Many weren't bad teams or bad ideas. They were thin wrappers around foundation model APIs, and the platform ate them alive. Foundation model pricing collapsed 98% within a single year — the fastest technology commoditization cycle in history — and every pricing drop made the wrapper layer thinner.