You’re not “AI Native”. — Writing<br>← WritingIt’s an interesting new obsession of ours. Don’t get me wrong, disregarding context for a second, I think generative AI is potentially revolutionary technology, I just don’t believe you. I’m not trying to be mean, I’m trying to be helpful, and that means I have to be critical. I don’t like rhetorical questions either, nor do I think you’re helped by me beating the living daylights out of a strawman of my making, so let’s honestly grapple with this. I can’t promise it’s all going to be comfortable, but you’ll be better off for it.<br>Why you don't really need to pursue AI adoption aggressively, and who does<br>How the current adoption playbook harms nearly everyone it touches<br>What a real AI native company might look like<br>Who’s afraid of a little competition?<br>Competing. It's what we're all here to do, right? Capture some market segment, defeat some other player. We've always competed, and technology has always been a competitive advantage. Gunpowder, the rifled barrel, the predator drone — entire wars have been settled by one side holding an edge the other couldn't answer. And the language of war imports cleanly into business: we talk about capturing share, defending position, killing the competition, going to market like it's a beachhead. It's not that I have naive ideas about history, I've just seen the pattern misapplied so many times that I always have to ask: well, what does that mean for you, specifically?<br>Because — and I need you to sit down for this — you're likely not at war. Not in the physical sense, and not in the metaphorical one either. The thing that makes a market actually winner-take-all isn't size or stakes or how it feels from inside; it's a specific combination of conditions that have to hold at once. You need:<br>strong network effects , where each new user makes the product meaningfully better for the others.<br>high multi-homing costs , where it's genuinely painful for a customer to use you and a competitor at the same time.<br>continuous returns to scale , where getting bigger keeps lowering your costs without limit.<br>When all three stack up, you get the dynamic everyone's afraid of: one player takes almost everything and holds it.<br>When they don't — when you've got one of the three, or none — you get what most markets actually look like. Several durable players, each holding a differentiated position, none of them dominating and none of them perishing. Oligopolies and duopolies, not conquests. So run the test on yourself before you accept the war footing: do all three conditions hold in your market, simultaneously? For most companies, they don't even hold in pairs. The concentration that does exist is clustered — it shows up heavily in platforms, search, marketplaces, social, a few corners of the knowledge economy — and it's largely absent from the services and product businesses where most software actually gets built. Even the people who preach speed-to-scale will, if you press them, admit the markets that reward it are the rare exception, not the rule.<br>Which means the urgency you're feeling — the one being sold to you under names like "AI native" — is, for most of us, second-hand smoke. And I do mean us. I’m inhaling it too. But no monster coming for your business doesn’t mean no one’s benefiting: plenty of people are happy to keep the air thick, because the thickness pays them. The part they'd rather you didn't notice is that nobody made you inhale. You chose your investors. You chose who to believe on LinkedIn. I chose mine. The urgency feels like ours because in a real sense it is — we reached for it, and reaching for it felt like nerve, like not getting left behind, right up until you notice it was mostly deference cosplaying as decisiveness. Which is good news, if you can stand it! A thing you chose is a thing you can stop choosing.<br>Take a beat. Think about the market you actually operate in. Think back to the trade shows of the last couple of years. Some competitors aren't there anymore — but most of them are, right? Now think about the product and sales meetings you sit in. There are companies in your market you've never framed as a real threat: they hold an adjacent segment with similar-but-different needs, or they come at the problem from an angle that was never going to be for everybody. You're not winning that fight or losing it. You're not in it.<br>A lot of this pressure comes from the people we took money from, and their other investments selling their wares to us. Some truly awe-inspiring companies were founded with VC money, and we’re right to look up to them (well, some of them). But not everybody you look up to is someone you have to imitate, and not every pattern is worth copying. You should also know your investors are very likely also invested in the frontier model labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, or the infrastructure beneath. If not, count your blessings and cherish your freedom.<br>Now, I owe you the honest exception (although there are...