This is a 25 eng startup. Anything can go wrong here. A hike in interest rates can lead to a down round causing the company to go into cost cutting mode, leading to a decrease in product velocity and prod incidents as infra is cut to the bone, in order to cope. Your top engineer can get sick and quit and your next in line isn't strong enough to keep the ship going.

I'm curious if you've ever worked at a startup, tried to invest in a startup, or considered purchasing a startup's product to know what it's like? The whole point is you're taking a risk trying something new and different. If you're just doing what a much bigger, established company is doing, you're fighting against an incumbent who already has much lower COGS than you.

Taking a bet on being AI-native as a startup is taking a bet that use of AI will result in lower COGS than the incumbent. As the old saying goes, "Nobody got fired for buying IBM", and yet Amazon was able to crack into that space by doing something novel. If Amazon was just IBM, why not buy IBM? The ultimate test of AI-native business models will be if these companies become the Amazon of today, or whether we'll write about them the way we wrote about "fifth generation computing" in Japan.