I've spent the last eight years as an investor watching the same pattern repeat. That era has ended with the advent of generative AI. As an investor, I'm excited; AI has finally opened up the potential for real innovation that's been missing since the mobile revolution. But I see founders building specialist AI products as if they were building the same tools of the last decade. Those who are playing by the old framework are about to make a big mistake.
The businesses that will fail in the AI era are those that start with an existing workflow and AI-ify it. The ones that will survive will leverage models' unique, nuanced properties to invent new workflows that were not technically possible before. I call these "post-skeuomorphic apps."
Skeuomorphism is the trap of assuming that a new technology should look like what came before. Early mobile apps constantly fell into this pattern. They replicated the physical world, like the trash can icon that looked like an actual garbage bin. But they weren't exploring what our phones could uniquely do.
The apps that broke through also broke this trap entirely. Uber didn't digitize the taxi dispatcher's desk. It asked: What becomes possible when everyone has a phone in their pocket that knows where they are? The phone became a remote control for your life, as investor Matt Cohler has said—for food (DoorDash), for rides (Uber), for groceries (Instacart). They didn't adapt existing workflows. They invented new ones.
AI is at the exact same inflection point. The founders who will win are asking a different question: What becomes possible now? What work can we invent that only AI makes possible? The winning applications will discover new workflows—and we don't even know what these workflows look like yet.
