Welcome to a World of $1M Ideas
Where execution costs less than imagination.
“The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.” — Derek Sivers, entrepreneur, 2005 (source)
This quote is startup scripture. A rallying cry for builders. Because if execution is everything, then ideas are cheap. You don’t need secrecy or stealth. You build in public. Share your roadmap. Launch on X. Execution is the moat.
But what if the equation flips?
What if execution becomes so cheap, so automated, that the idea itself becomes the rare commodity?
That’s where we are.
AI slashes the cost of doing. One person can now do what once took ten. Tools write, design, code, manage, market, and launch for you.
In this new world, the original idea—a novel SaaS concept, a clever GTM strategy, a new take on an old problem—is the product.
AI Slashes the Cost of Execution
Execution used to mean hiring teams, raising funds, managing timelines, building prototypes, wrangling operations. Now? AI eats most of that for breakfast.
Just look at what’s already possible:
Build an app without touching a line of code. Skip the dev hire—describe what you want and let the machine make it.
Prototype without Figma. Tools like Cursor and Replit let you sketch, test, and ship in one fluid motion.
Outsource your strategy. AI can co-pilot everything from your hiring plan to your go-to-market.
Turn project management into a checklist. Complex coordination becomes a set of auto-executing workflows.
Spin up a marketing team of agents. They write, post, optimize, repeat.
Execution still matters, especially for the bold, the complex, the moonshots. But for countless viable businesses, a single prompt soon replaces entire teams.
This changes everything: how we build products, run companies, and think about what’s worth doing at all.
Ideas Are the New IP
A good idea used to be where the work began. Now, it is the work. Ideas are your new intellectual property.
Building in public? That era may be over. When execution is cheap, so is theft. Ideas become the prize, and people start keeping them close. Expect more gated communities, less open sharing, and a return to stealth mode.
Welcome to the age of idea stocks. Just like patents or music rights, ideas start trading hands. Think micro-licensing. Proof-of-inception. Platforms where conceptual IP is bought, sold, and verified like stocks.
Enter idea equity and idea flippers. Forget sweat equity, this is spark equity. Early ideators get rewarded for originality alone. Some skip the build entirely and flip their ideas like domain names, bundling concepts for quick-launch operators to run with.
How Individuals Adapt to an Idea-First World
In a world where ideas carry value the way we work, think, and prioritize has to change.
Prioritization becomes a superpower. When ideas are abundant and easy to act on, choosing the right one becomes everything. Call it prioritization intelligence. The ability to:
Spot the signals of a high-leverage idea.
Time your execution.
Know when to double down, and when to walk away.
Spend your most finite resource—attention—wisely.
The better your filter, the bigger your outcome.
An idea farm is non-negotiable. You can’t trust memory alone. You need a second brain, a place to store, sort, and surface ideas. Without it, great ideas slip by unnoticed, or get buried under noise. The most successful people have systems for nurturing them.
You need to actively protect your creativity. AI is a hell of a shortcut, but shortcuts dull the blade. The more you let it think for you, the more your thinking fades. So you’ll need practices to keep your creativity sharp: AI-free zones during your day, regular digital sabbaticals, and working offline, with pen and paper.
Creative confidence goes mainstream. Call it the vibe coding effect: non-coders building apps, creatives launching side projects, solopreneurs learning fast and shipping even faster. The line between idea and product is thinner than ever, so more people cross it.
Only the elite can rely on their unique skills. Top-tier coders, writers, designers, and other specialists will always be in demand. But for most knowledge workers, competing on one skill alone gets harder. AI raises the baseline. To stand out, you'll need a unique combination of personal brand, community, expert insight, taste, and distribution.
How Companies Compete in an Idea-First World
Organizations don’t just scale anymore—they rewire. When ideas are currency, you restructure to mint them and protect them.
Curation is survival. More ideas mean more noise. Human filters—analysts, creators, influencers—rise in status. Algorithmic filters—AI agents, feed pre-sorting, custom digests—go from nice-to-have to mission-critical. If you’re not curating, you’re drowning.
Technical excellence gets a new job description. The best engineers become architects of feedback. They loop insights from users, AI models, and proprietary data into fast, fluid iterations. Code still matters, but the real edge is in orchestration.
Studios, not factories. The new operating model looks less like SaaS and more like Pixar. Cross-functional teams spin up concepts, test with real users, then toss or scale fast. Ideation becomes the business—Creativity, Inc. becomes the handbook for industries that never saw themselves as creative.
Custom software kills the app. In 2023, I read Dan Shipper’s prediction: “a bespoke app for everyone.” At the time, it sounded like a stretch. Now it feels like an understatement. AI agents spin up fully tailored tools—in your browser, inside your OS, without needing you to even ask. Forget downloading. Forget onboarding. The app gets replaced by the experience itself.
Mockups are a waste of time. If you can build the real thing in minutes, why draw it first? Interactive mockups vanish. Teams skip wireframes and jump straight to code—from napkin sketch to working prototype before lunch.
“I talked to the CEO of a moderately big tech co who said they'd replaced Figma with Replit. This surprised me because I don't even think of them as being in the same business. But he said Replit is so good at generating apps that they just go straight to prototype now.” — Paul Graham (source)
Sprints as default mode. Hackathons become how things get done. You can ship something real in a few days, so you do. Focused, time-boxed creativity becomes standard ops.
The New Rules of Competitive Advantage
When launch costs collapse, ideas—not infrastructure—become the battlefield.
Speed rules supreme. First-mover advantage goes from nice-to-have to critical. Ship early, and you lock in the users, the mindshare, and the momentum, before the clones show up.
Domain > code. Technical skill still matters, but the real moat is insight. The teams who deeply understand the problem—the pain, the nuance, the stakes—can move faster and build smarter. That kind of expertise doesn’t come from GitHub.
Data stays royalty. Call it the remix era of proprietary intelligence. Products infused with unique data deliver something the generics can’t touch. It’s still the new oil. It just flows faster now.
More junk, rarer gems. Cheap execution means we’ll drown in bad products. That’s the tradeoff. But within the flood: brilliance. Weird, wonderful ideas that never would’ve survived the old gatekeeping of cost and complexity.
The shelf life shrinks. Every product is temporary. As soon as something works, it gets copied, leveled up, or left behind. Fast creation leads to fast decay. Constant reinvention is the new standard.
The attention war escalates. Focus is finite. The fight to win it gets louder, sharper, more AI-optimized. Expect more dopamine bait. More behavioral hooks. And more need to protect your mental feed like it’s sacred ground.
Distribution is destiny. When the idea is the same, the audience makes the difference. Real community. A trusted voice. A brand that actually means something. That’s what cuts through the noise and keeps the copycats in your rearview.
VC flips the script. Expect more rapid-fire "test funding" with smaller initial checks and milestone-based funding for ideas showing early traction. At the same time, startups need less investment overall, with AI-savvy teams accomplishing what previously required 10x the people.
"Before this A.I. boom, start-ups generally burned $1 million to get to $1 million in revenue," investor Gaurav Jain told the New York Times. "Now getting to $1 million in revenue costs one-fifth as much and could eventually drop to one-tenth."
Societal Shockwaves
The pivot from execution to ideation rewires society itself.
The AI divide widens. A new kind of inequality emerges. Those fluent in AI leap ahead, compounding gains in productivity, creativity, and income. The split could rival the Industrial Revolution, except this time, it's about who can think with machines, not build them.
Geography loses its grip. If open access to AI holds, the old barriers start to crumble. You no longer need a Silicon Valley zip code to innovate. A fast connection and a sharp mind can unlock the same tools from Nairobi to Nepal. Regional underdogs get a shot at the main stage.
Governments can't keep up. When execution is instant, regulation feels glacial. Laws lag behind AI misuse, data exploitation, and ethically questionable products. The pressure is on. Governments must accelerate or risk becoming irrelevant referees in a game already in play.
AI burnout is real. Ironically, AI doesn’t free us, it tempts us to do more. Take on another side hustle. Launch another product. Say yes to everything. Until the crash hits. AI dependency runs so deep, losing access starts to feel like withdrawal. Creativity flatlines. Productivity nosedives.
Bad ideas scale just as fast. The dark side of cheap execution? Malicious concepts go live before the defenses load. Deepfakes flood the feed. Exploitative tools hit the market. Digital weapons go viral. When the brakes come too late, the damage is already done.
Ideas are more valuable just when we get worse at coming up with them
Ironically, as we come to rely on AI more and more, it reduces our ability to think original thoughts. It reminds me of Cal Newport’s Deep Work Hypothesis:
"The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive."
The same is true for ideas and AI: original thinking is becoming increasingly hard at exactly the same time it’s becoming increasingly valuable.
Originality used to be a bonus. Now it's the moat. In the AI era, ideas aren't where you start, they're where you compete.