Weekly Column
AI Didn't Kill Funding Rounds. It Killed the Excuse.
My buddy's currently building the kind of video game that takes several days of PTO and a very understanding girlfriend to finish playing from beginning to end. The ones where you can abandon the main task just to follow the Oregon Trail to the edge of the video game? That kind. You may ask what studio he's working for, but you'd be wrong, because he's building the whole thing using Claude Code and his overworked coffee maker.
How will he bring it to market? On his own, naturally. Because it's 2026 and you can just do that.
I get it. I wrote my first novel between 2005 and 2013. It's terrific, for the record. I have a journalism degree and I wrote professionally for six years, so trust me, I know what I'm doing. I'm still hunting for an agent, because marketing a 150,000 word literary novel takes something well past "unbelievable effort."
Someone always says it. "You know it's 2026, you could just market it yourself."
Sure. Let me just dust off my fame, which I don't have, and pivot my book into a self help guide or a cookbook, which it also isn't. It's literary fiction. Nobody read literary fiction in 2005. Fewer read it now. Self publishing a literary novel is like dropping it down a well, drawing a treasure map to the well, and then selling people the map.
And this is where my developer friends in New York come in. Every single one of them will tell you, with total confidence, that funding rounds are dead. Over. A relic. Anyone can build anything now, and software is free, so why would investors bother?
Except funding rounds are still very much alive, and they're still writing checks that dwarf what a coffee maker and a laptop can produce alone. The tell is always the same. These same freshman companies, the ones built entirely on AI tooling and grit, still send their first developer out to actually sell the thing. And it goes about as well as you'd expect. Which is to say, badly. Because building the product was never the hard part. Selling it always was. And as much as I dislike advertising and sales, even the most well developed product can be helped along by an entire department of motivated effort.
AI didn't kill funding. It killed the excuse for not having a business plan.
Daniel