The constraint used to be: Can we afford to build and ship this? Now the constraint is: Do we know what to test? And can we get in front of users fast enough to learn?
https://steveblank.com/2026/03/17/your-startup-is-probably-dead-on-arrival/
A design is a hypothesis. It used to be expensive to test a hypothesis. You’d have to build the thing!
It used to be risky to run experiments. There was a known cost, and an unknown payoff.
As the cost of testing your ideas rapidly approaches zero, the main cost becomes the opportunity cost. The ideas you could have tested, but didn’t, because you were still running the old program. You still think testing ideas is risky and expensive. That hasn’t been true for a while now.
If you know how to program, it’s already been wrong, for a long time. For most app ideas, most programmers can build a MVP in a surprisingly short time. (Just look at Pieter Levels. The special thing about him, as far as I can tell, is his willingness to Actually Do Things.)
There’s an interesting point here: the psychological costs remain basically identical. We’ve evolved to be very risk-averse. And then we get additional risk-averseness training from our parents and the school system. Decades of the same message: don’t fail, don’t make mistakes.
That’s the worst possible OS to enter this decade with.
As the cost of actually building things rapidly approaches zero, the psychological costs will now predominate.1 Thus the advantage will go to those who are willing to take risks, willing to try things, willing to fail.
Willing to rapidly go through the loop of forming a hypothesis and testing it. Willing to be wrong, over and over again.
That’s a hell of a good skill to develop. It always was, but now even more so. It’s the closest thing we have to a superpower.