A New Spin on Start Up Doom: Nope, Not Good News
April 29, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
One of the “think thing” essays has been parked in my to-do file for about a month. Today (April 15, 2026) is the day. The write up is “Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival.” With folks getting RIFed left, right, and sideways, the “start up now” chant is getting louder. The cited essay said:
… most startups older than two years old have an obsolete business plan – and a technical stack and team that’s likely out of date.
The essay tips its “think thing” hat toward smart software. The argument about Titanicism gets back on track with this statement:
The constraint used to be: Can we afford to build and ship this? Now the constraint is: Do we know what to test? And can we get in front of users fast enough to learn? Agile is no longer a serial process.
Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
For me, this is “go fast, young man.” Apologies to Horace Greeley who wrote in 1865 something similar. The jargon for this concept is accelerationism.
The problem for the start up is that it must adopt smart software. The problem for the two year old start up is having to adapt to smart software. To start today, one must know the agentic boogie. To catch up, one must start over. Does this sound like good news for startups?
The source essay provides a list of tips. Here are three:
- You need a 2026 playbook
- The start up needs a “defensible moat”
- And I quote: “If you’re not losing sleep, you haven’t understood what’s happening.”
Okay, let me bring up a slightly different angle on this argument. Consider large companies. How do their new products work? If we look at Microsoft, it did the acceleration thing, burning tires in front of the disco. What’s happened? Microsoft is parking its AI hot rod and talking to experts about making the Copilot do more than get speeding tickets.
What about Amazon? The company is doing new things like killing functional Kindles and making chips and building data centers near a war zone and making life difficult for a customer to find a semi-decent product. It’s going fast and doing the equivalent of burning donuts in front of the disco.
And Google? It has gone slow. Like a turtle it has moved forward. Its pace of innovation, however, has allowed many flowers to bloom. Who can keep track of the new things Google is doing? But some Googley things are catching attention; for example, fiddling with YouTube ads and then insisting that those ads are not fiddled. Google also hides functionality in its smart software. At the same time, it chokes off innovation for the Android ecosystem. But the company sells ads. AI is a utility forcing Google to flounder in a quest for the good old days of traffic means clicks means a river of ad revenue.
These examples suggest that “startup thinking” at big companies does not do much better than regular startups; that is, the failure rate is baked in. A hit is a fluke, not a system and method like making commercial food like Nabisco chocolate chip cookies. (Watch a video on the process and then compare that method with the startup flounder, pivot, adapt thing.)
Several observations:
- Smart software is not able to get outputs right more than 75 to 85 percent of the time
- The agentic fantasy means that different smart software components are going to function correctly almost 99 percent of the time; otherwise, those retirement savings, yeah, gone due to a smart software problem buried deep in agentic Disneyland
- In the 2026 business environment, organizations are faced with problems not resolved by a Harvard Business School case study: War, civil issues, think thing marketing, etc.
Net net: Going fast is fun. What’s new? The speed factor. Humans, amp it up. Live fast. Die young.
Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2026
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