Worried that the big AI labs will trample your idea? That fear has historically been overstated. This AI on Air clip, excerpted from a recent episode on the @ycombinator show, features Patrick Collison @patrickc, @stripe co-founder, on how founders should think about this anxiety. ▷ He draws an analogy to 20 years ago, when the perennial question was "what if Google does this?" Google seemed omnipotent, with immense talent and essentially infinite capital and compute, but human organizations are complicated: aggressively pursuing 100 priorities at once is nearly impossible. Google did incredibly well in specific areas, yet it never did all the things. ▷ He separates two distinct threats: the labs deliberately expanding their scope, where the track record is checkered and the fear overstated, versus the models themselves advancing, where agentic capabilities could obviate specific verticals or tasks even if labs stay focused, something that has already happened in certain domains. ▷ So he is skeptical of the first threat and candid about the second: the answer depends on your forecast of model capabilities, and there is no simple answer.