Product first

Over the years I (painfully, by experience), became a believer in "product first". As a startup, everything you do at the beginning needs to lead to a great product. And everyone who tells you something else is stuck in the far away internet past. Yes, facebook or instagram of AirBnB or thousands of unknown but highly successful (SaaS) software companies could get by with shitty interfaces - 15 or 20 years ago. Times change, and the user expects flawless experiences - in B2B and B2C alike, and even for early stage products. Because the truth is, it's 10x easier than it was 15 years ago to actually build these great looking interfaces and user experiences. There is simply no way around. 

There is one exception though: and that is when your technology does something so urgently needed, so unique, that users will not mind if the UX & UI is sloppy. Now, every (!) founder will assume that their product belongs into this category. However, you should not assume you are that type of technology, because only one-in-a-million products belong to this category. So accept the reality of what users expect these days and simply go build it. That's the way to success.

Drowning in a sea of AI-generated content

There will be companies building highly personalized AI-generated content creators. Those will be available for $25 a month subscription and will allow everyone who has $25 to spare to seem "active" on social media. Especially LinkedIn will be plagued by a sea of generic AI generated content. And as users, we will be drowning in it. It's going to be a huge challenge for social media companies to filter relevant, and non-generic articles.

Noise Filtering

AI seems to be more of a information technology revolution than the "invent" of a new intelligent species. And it comes at the right time, to help us make sense out of the cacophony of information and voices out there in the internet. AI's immediate use-case is noise filtering - and will replace the search engine as we know it.