Abandon the 2024 script! Silicon Valley Godfather Warns: Startup Companies Over Two Years Old are Most Likely Outdated This may be a macro perspective article that can save lives. Steve Blank, the godfather of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and founder of the Lean Startup theory, recently issued an extremely cold warning letter. He just met a founder he invested in six years ago. This founder is extremely diligent and has been working hard for the past six years, polishing products, doing system integration, and building moats. Now, he is ready to come out and raise a new round of big money. However, after reading his business plan, Steve Blank's spine went cold. He found that during the years when the founder was buried in work, the outside world had turned upside down. The "technological barrier" he spent five years building has long been commodified by hundreds of external drone companies with less money and larger teams; The niche market he relentlessly pursued has not yet been disrupted, but the demand for the defense market next door has already exploded. Steve Blank came to a chilling conclusion: if your company is established for more than two years, your business plan, technology stack, and team configuration are likely to be completely outdated. If you have been focusing solely on pulling the car with your head down and not looking up at the road recently, you may have missed these fatal changes below. 1. AI's dimensionality reduction blow: The cost and speed of software development are completely rewritten Previously, developing an MVP (Minimum Feasible Product) required several months and a large development team. Now? With tools like Claude Code, you can run an MVP in a few days or even hours. This means that 'being able to make things' is no longer a proof of your core ability. The structure of the development team is undergoing tremendous changes: there is no longer a need for so many junior and intermediate level programmers. A few people, or even one person, can finish the work of a previous team. Previously, you burned a large amount of funds on building a code moat; Now, the big model has commodified everything. 2. The demise of agile development: from "serial testing" to "parallel bombing" The previous agile development process was: create a version ->test ->modify ->retest. This is called a serial process. Now, with the assistance of AI agents, you can run ten pricing models and twenty user experience processes simultaneously. The bottleneck is no longer "engineering ability", but "judgment" - do you know what to test? 3. The dramatic change in product logic: from "software as interface" to "software as result" This is the most central insight of the entire article. What is the current software like? Give the user a dashboard and tell them 'what should you do next', then wait for the user to click the mouse. What will be the software of the future? The AI agent will directly do that step for the user. Customers buy software not to see more screens, but to get their work done. If your competitor's product can automatically solve work orders and book meetings, while your product is still waiting for users to manually operate, then you are doomed. With the change of product form, the pricing model will also be completely overturned: from the past "seat based charging (SaaS)" to "result based charging" (how much money is charged for each work order solved). 4. Throw away your illusion of sunk costs Many companies that have been established for two or three years have fallen into extreme embarrassment: the "proprietary code moat" that took several years and huge amounts of capital to build has been turned into a cheap commodity overnight by AI. Many founders are unwilling to transition because we have spent several years, investors are investing in this direction, and our roadmap is already set. Steve Blank mercilessly pointed out that these are 'sunk costs of debt nature'. The real assets that can keep you alive are: deep domain knowledge, customer relationships, regulatory approvals obtained, and proprietary data. A founder who can survive must have the courage to look at their hard work over the past few years and cruelly ask themselves a question: What would I do if I were to start a new business today with the same money, in today's market, and using today's tools? Don't use the old script of 2024 to run the new track of 2026 anymore. If you can still sleep peacefully now, it only means that you haven't figured out what's happening in the outside world.