Paul Graham just described the future of startups in one sentence, and most founders will miss it.

A team told him they’d raised so much money, and had expenses so low, they could park the capital in bonds and literally run the company off the interest.

PG told them they should.

THAT’S INSANE.

AI’s just erased costs.

Your biggest historic expenses, engineering, ops, support, even chunks of GTM Ops, are collapsing.

Teams of 3 can now do what took 30.

So what happens when headcount trends to zero?

You could just… not take the money.

You no longer need venture capital to build a product or business online.

Vibe code to start? Sure. You’ll probably start hitting issues with scaling that vibe-coded product, but you also don’t need to scale so fast you need to hire a whole team and take on funding. You can take it slowly and sustainably, and hire that one engineer or marketer or whomever to help out once you’re ready.

You’re not forced to do anything. You don’t need to be beholden to the perverse hypergrowth incentives put in place by venture capital.

The next era isn’t “build cheap, scale later.”

It’s:
Build on your own terms.
Scale on your own terms.
Own your future.