Is the lean startup playbook of starting narrow still enough in the age of AI? In this AI on Air clip, excerpted from a recent episode on the @ycombinator channel, Patrick Collison @patrickc, co-founder of @stripe, offers a debatable take. ▷ The traditional lean startup doctrine of buying Google Ads, identifying a narrow crevice, and expanding aggressively from there has become far more competitive, since those niches are now aggressively tilled and the internet is much bigger than it was 20 years ago. ▷ He argues that founders may have to more aggressively decorrelate in the AI era, taking divergent starting points nobody else is trying to occupy. Many of the most successful companies of the last decade, from the AI labs themselves to Anduril, are in fact very anti-lean-startup. ▷ Twenty years ago, lean was almost the only thing to do given the capital available; today AI makes spinning up an organization with many different potentialities and capabilities far easier, so founders can start much more aggressive and ambitious things up front.