437: Data Is the Only Moat

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Now here's a question that I've been sitting with lately. If building software keeps getting easier, and it clearly is, then what exactly are we building our businesses on? Because conversations about the quality of wipe coded or AI engineered software aside, it is obvious that with LLM originated tooling, AI coding, writing complex software has become significantly easier. It hasn't become completely solved. It's still a process that requires an orchestrator and somebody who knows what the thing is gonna be, what it should look like. And at this point, that isn't just a technical capacity. It's becoming product management and customer development that intersects with engineering. But I think it's pretty clear that as these tools get better, the process of creating code bases that when deployed become products that people purchase or services that people pay for, that is clearly moving towards a threshold where software engineering and running software businesses as we know them will have changed quite a bit. It's still going to be a job that requires insight and capacity and skill, but it doesn't require 10 people anymore to build something meaningful. It might just require three and a little bit of AI or two and some AI and maybe just one and a lot of AI. So if it becomes significantly easier to build products and the act of building a software business is not as expensive anymore because it's faster and requires fewer resources, then what will be the modes of the future? Of the immediate future where this change is already happening, which is trying to adjust, and maybe five or ten years down the line when AI generated software products are so commonplace and easily built and deployed and maintained that that's just what people are gonna do. There used to be a lot of things we could point to as motes. How hard it is to build a software product reliably and how hard it is to make it consumable and maintainable, how hard it is to translate your knowledge from an industry that you have as an expert into a product that serves other people in this industry. But AI systems, these tools that we are starting to use, they're taking over a lot of that now. So what is left over here? I find that the one thing that stands out, no matter how much AI you throw at it, is real world data. Data that is generated by humans by human brains. Because data, all by itself, is right now experiencing this bifurcation, this fork in the road. On one side, there's the data made by humans, by people. They are recording podcast episodes like this one. Or they are putting videos out there. People actually still write their own social media posts sometimes. Or they write blog posts, books, that stuff. Anything that is genuinely human generated. And then there's the synthetic side AI generated …