Ai hasn’t killed just banks and big4
It will also destroy venture capital
Frugality eliminates the need for capital
Or for employees.
Close to twenty years ago, I got to see from really close the evolution of what we now call the Bitcoin. Probably the greatest contribution of India to technology after the invention of zero. Bitcoin solved every perceivable problem linked to trust. And it was built by ONE man. No company. No address. No employees. No venture capital.
Yet hundreds if not thousands of people worked on it. Participating in the development gave u a ring side view on the process to mine bitcoins. No govt royalty was involved. No tax. No regulators. And yet that one man – whose identity is to this date unknown – changed the world so profoundly that nothing was the same after. Bitcoin is a USD 2 trillion stock. Doesn’t matter if it goes up or down – the point is that this is going to replace the dollar sooner than later. It is going to kill banks and make central banks jobless.
Bitcoin grew out of one man’s desire to automate havala – the business of moving dollars and rupees across borders – without using the banking system. Till then two banks controlled 90% of havala. Approx usd 20 – 50 billion per month. This was the real business of those two banks. The rest was a charade. They were invincible. And then 2008 happened. And the bank went bust. It now trades below book value.
In 2008, the computer architecture used to mine bitcoins was extended to telco networks. It was then called hdvsl. The govt got it immediately. HDVSL was designed to house and move bitcoins. But it could do so much more. Like eliminate the need for a pc or to put a PC into a Nokia Symbian phone. It could also eliminate the need for a CPU in a laptop. Tramsmeta crusoe had built a software cpu. The ARM core SA 10 which then formed the core of platforms like rasberry pi had already become available.
One thing the Indian govt doesn’t lack is technical might. The minister for science & technology was a lawyer – he got the use case. The DST secy was a iit techie. He got it immediately. The startup was put in front of HE Abdul Kalam who took a minute to realise what this was. It got India’s highest award that year on technology day. And all of this from bitcoin to hdvsl was one man. With one machine.
Startup’s built teams because thinking, building, selling, and scaling were once separate skills. The Internet + AI collapsed those boundaries.
If your startup needs funding before it has revenue, people before it has leverage, or meetings before it has a working system—
it’s not early.
It’s inefficient.
The modern startup isn’t a company.
It’s a single mind with compute.
Venture capital didn’t create innovation.
It financed coordination costs that no longer exist.
Ai doesn’t reward alignment.
It rewards coherence.
And coherence only exists in one head at a time.
The future doesn’t belong to teams that scale. It belongs to individuals who don’t need to.
