The cost of building software collapsed. Anyone can ship a product in weeks now. Which means shipping a product in weeks is worth nothing by itself.
When everyone has the same speed, speed is not an advantage. It's the entry fee. The question that decides who wins moved somewhere else: what did you choose to build?
What vending machines taught me
I spent seven years placing vending machines before I touched software. Every machine taught the same lesson: the placement decides everything.
You can have the best machine in the market. Stock it perfectly, price it right, maintain it well. Put it in the wrong location and it's dead money. Put an average machine in the right location and it prints.
I learned this the expensive way — by paying for wrong locations with my own money. There is no faster teacher.
Software is the same game
Building apps is placement, not machinery. What you choose to build matters more than how fast you build it. A perfectly executed product nobody needed is a vending machine in an empty corridor.
The AI tools everyone is excited about make the machine cheaper. They do nothing about the corridor. Deciding where demand actually is — what a customer will pay for, not what they say they like — is still done by a human, and it's still learned the same way: by being wrong with your own money until you stop being wrong.
Where that leaves founders
It leaves judgment as the last moat. Not code, not speed, not access to tools — everyone has the tools.
The founders I'd bet on now are the ones with scar tissue from real markets. People who have stocked shelves, priced things, watched customers walk past. They already paid for the lesson everyone else is about to learn: execution is cheap, choosing is expensive.
Judgment is the moat. Speed is just the entry fee.