For most of my life, a company was a thing other people had. Something big and far away, with funding rounds and a team and a board, that you couldn't just decide to build. You needed money you didn't have and skills you hadn't trained for. So you didn't.
That's the part that's actually changed, and I don't think enough people have noticed.
I built Memolio, a personalised illustrated book for grandparents, on my own, for a few hundred euros a month in software. No funding. No team. No outside investor taking a slice and setting the terms. The barrier I always assumed was money or credentials turned out to be neither. It was just deciding to start, and then having tools good enough to cover the gaps in what I knew.
The model nobody offers you
When people talk about startups, they almost always mean one model: raise money, hire fast, grow at all costs, and either become enormous or die. Venture capital is built for outliers. It needs you to chase a number so big that most companies trying to hit it will fail, because the few that succeed pay for all the ones that don't. That's a fine machine if you're the fund. It's a strange thing to sign up for if you're a person who just wants to build something good and make a living from it.
Here's the question I keep coming back to. Why can't people just earn a good living every month from their own small business, without having to expand to some insane metric? Why is "sustainable and mine" treated as a failure mode?
For the first time, that's a real option for almost anyone. AI didn't just make software cheaper to build. It removed the team you used to need to build it. One person, with taste and stubbornness and a few subscriptions, can now run the website, the pipeline, the accounting, the support, the marketing. The things that used to require hiring now require describing what you want and checking the work.
What I'm actually arguing for
I'm not saying don't be ambitious. I'm saying ambition doesn't have to mean handing your company to investors who need it to be a hundred times bigger than you ever wanted.
And I'm not saying never hire. Hiring isn't something I want to avoid, it's something I want to earn. AI lets me prove the idea works first, on my own, before anyone has to stake their livelihood on it. Once the business is genuinely sustainable, hiring stops being a gamble and becomes a way to make it better: experts who are sharper than me at their craft, trusted people who can make real decisions when I can't be at the terminal. The difference is the order you do it in. Prove it works, then bring in the people who can lift the quality beyond what one person can.
You can build a small, mostly automated business that earns you a living, answers to nobody, and stays exactly the size that makes sense. You can own all of it. Anybody who has ever believed in an idea, and has a few hundred euros a month to spare, can now actually build the thing instead of just having it.
That's not a consolation prize. For a lot of us, it's the whole point. I'm proud to be one of the people trying to prove it works, and it has already changed my life for the better, well before it's made me rich.