Everyone as an Entrepreneur - Will Johnson
Will Johnson
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Everyone as an Entrepreneur<br>A possible future where owning a business is the norm rather than the exception
Will<br>Jul 17, 2026
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One potential outcome of AI on the traditional economy is turning more of it into the gig economy. As AI reasoning continues to get better (and the length of tasks that it can execute with reasoning continues to increase) the Operations Equation shows that more processes will be reduced to “jobs” that are triggered via an API call.<br>Operations Equation
Cost of Task = Direct Cost (Labor, Compute, etc.)<br>+ (Cycle Time * Opportunity Cost)<br>+ (Quality Risk * Impact)
Uber and Task Rabbit are examples of discrete real world jobs (move these atoms from one location to another) that are triggered by an API call. This is happening for knowledge work as well. Mechanical Turk existed for years to get people to complete the simplest of tasks (answering questions and clicking buttons) but this paradigm--paying for the output (result) rather than paying for the input (labor)--is going to expand as the economy evolves to incorporate workers who are entirely digital.<br>Data provides a positive learning loop
More data is being created each day which is in turn used to train models.1<br>Models are measured in many ways but two that matter to a business are:<br>Desired outcomes/$<br>This is the Operations Equation solved for volume rather than unit cost--cycle time trends towards zero which takes opportunity cost out of the equation2
Scope of problems they can achieve<br>Increases in reasoning (how well they arrive at the desired outcome)
Increases in capabilities (interactions with data and touchpoints with the economy)
This is somewhat correlated to how much ambiguity (how little context you have to provide) you leave with a prompt.
As more processes become automated, they will be executed more often, and more data will be created. More. More. More. Total transactions increase. Learning increases.<br>AI today is the worst it will ever be.<br>AI is going to keep getting better and better.<br>Displaced knowledge workers
As the pace of business increases (more transactions total with each unit of work completed in less time), there is a possibility for a k-shaped labor market:<br>Those who can leverage AI
Those who can’t
For any given role in the knowledge economy, the person who can leverage AI is going to have an advantage over the person who cannot. And, as the scope of problems that AI can solve--transactions it can facilitate without human intervention--grows due to the positive learning loop, the bar for leveraging AI will continue to raise.<br>Those with capital and those with deep technical or domain expertise will be fine. Others are going to have to be deliberate about leveling up.<br>Business in an app
The government recognizes that reducing obstacles for entrepreneurship is critical for providing an off-ramp for displaced workers.3<br>Stripe already provides the following pieces to the entrepreneurship puzzle:<br>Payments--online and in-person
LLC/C-Corp registration via Stripe Atlas
Bookkeeping (revenue side)
Business credit (based on revenue)
Opportunities in front of them:<br>Convince a state (Wyoming? Nevada?) to allow for opening of LLCs via API4 - Stripe Atlas API
Create a “My Business” app that allows someone to create an LLC from within the app with a photo of their ID
Payments made via the app are automatically categorized as business expenses
File taxes via API as both sides of the P&L would lie within Stripe Dashboard
Offer stablecoin for B2B payments that, when used, gives the purchaser a small discount and gives users reason to maintain an on-platform balance
Business credit based on full on-platform P&L
Allow for trusted agents (not sure what these look like yet but I imagine we end up with a handful of platforms that we end up trusting for running economic agents on like email) to create LLCs via the API
“Start a business in five minutes with an app.”<br>For the pro-business, anti-tax, administration, this would be a massive win and provide an easy way for Americans everywhere to turn to entrepreneurship in opportunity or in need.<br>For entrepreneurs building the agent-first platforms of the future, this provides them an all-in-one finance solution.<br>For workers, it provides a possible path to building a business which may or may not be fulfilling work at the end of API calls.<br>Single-payer healthcare
A follow-up on widespread job displacement would be large-scale loss of healthcare coverage--60% of Americans under 65 obtain their health insurance via their employer. That would pressure governments--state and federal--to provide more health care coverage to citizens who can’t afford it otherwise.<br>AI may provide the push for America to transition to single-payer healthcare in order to expand coverage as well as means to provide employment to offset labor losses elsewhere.<br>Short of a single-payer system, enrollment in...