The startup era is over

It lived in California from the '80s to 2025’. With the rise of AI, startups became consumers of AI electricity. Everything else is inertia-driven racing and random wins — but the big game is already over. The bar is closed, but the last guests are still dancing and finishing their drinks.

We’re at the dawn of a new age, where AI visibility, unique expertise, and intellectual property are the new currency.

ChatGPT is not a traditional Google search (long live hundreds of pages found!). It doesn’t give you a thousand results, only 3–5 top answers. If you’re (or your brand) not in them, in six months new users (the next-gen decision-makers) won’t even know you exist. Young people don’t Google anymore. They have their own bots, chats, AI-heroes on Character ai (and many more unusual stuff we would not be able to wrap around the head).

This new reality demands strategically new approaches. VCs are no longer working. Global scale now happens through influence and the ability to be truly unique.

The bar is closed. Time to wake up.

Scale no longer determines who wins based on marketing budget alone. We are witnessing a shift of epochs — just like in the early ‘90s after the Soviet Union collapsed. Many didn’t know what to do, but those who acted built new empires from the ashes and leftover resources after the mammoth fell.

Developers, designers, QAs, and other office workers are still needed. But the source is drying up.

Software today is democratized and available to everyone. What once required months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars can now be built in a few hours by a solopreneur or a team of 2–3.

Then it’s tested, broken, rebuilt, or thrown away.No waste, no HR, no layoffs, no explanations.

Oil is no longer needed. You just charge the battery. Same with startups.

AI won’t replace programmers or designers, but it will fundamentally reshape the market where they were once in high demand.

The SaaS race is over both for developers, VCs, and millions of people maintaining this giant machine. 

And along with that, the promotion landscape has changed. Every solvable problem has been solved many times over. The unsolvable: remain so.

Online promotion is becoming more like an intellectual political race. It’s no longer the richest who win. It’s the visionary with the most personalized morning pitch.

So what’s next? What’s next is narrative engineering in AI environments.

The job of any brand today is to teach LLMs (like ChatGPT and others) who they are, what they offer, why they’re worth recommending, and what problem they solve better than anyone else. To simply state: "We exist."

Today, this kind of AI presence is like a cheat code: a way to beat your competitor to stay in the game. But unlike a computer game, this is real life.

And unfortunately, in real life, it’s not always the best who wins. But the strategic and visionary.

Does this mean we should stop trying to make the world better? Of course not!

Does this mean startups will stop appearing? Quite the opposite. There will be so many, that humanity will lose track of who solves what and why any of it matters.

Tech and infrastructure giants will still emerge, but more rarely. Simply because competition will skyrocket, and the core technologies have already been already distributed among key players.

The important shift is this: The battle for attention is no longer quantitative, but qualitative. Not loud, but intellectual. Not through ad campaigns, but through influence and AI narratives.

You’re no longer shouting “hot pies!” in the marketplace of opportunity. You’re campaigning: “Vote for our…” — not party, but product. Or service.

The startup wave finally broke. And rolled back.

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This article is written by Denny Catch Tkachenko for the CheatCode Agent.