Same pattern, different decade, ten times bigger consequences.
Let me ask you something that might sting a little. How many revolutionary opportunities have you watched slip by while you were getting ready to be ready?
I’m not talking about missing out on Bitcoin or Tesla stock. I’m talking about something deeper, something that happens to smart people every single day. They think their way out of action.
Back in 1995, I was launching my first internet company in a world where most people thought the web was a glorified library. Did I have a crystal ball showing me Amazon, Google, or social media? Not even close. I barely understood the technology I was betting on.
But here’s what haunts me when I look at the AI landscape today. I’m watching the exact same movie play out, except this time the stakes are far higher, and most people are sitting in the planning seats instead of the playing field.
While You’re Planning, Someone Else Is Already Ahead
Right now, somewhere, someone decided to start using AI to automate their customer service last month. They didn’t wait for the perfect solution. They picked a tool, trained it on their FAQ, and started iterating. Today they’re handling three times more customers with half the headaches, and they’ve already moved on to testing voice AI for phone calls.
Right now, a small business owner thought, “What if I used AI to write my social content?” They didn’t research for six months. They spent part of a weekend learning how to prompt it. Now they’re publishing more engaging content than competitors with full marketing teams, and they’ve already moved on to AI-generated video.
Right now, someone in your industry stopped asking “what’s the right AI strategy” and started asking “what’s the smallest AI experiment I can run today.”
Guess who’s going to own your market in eighteen months.
This Isn’t the Same Timeline as Last Time
Unlike the internet boom, this isn’t playing out over decades. This is compressed innovation. What took ten years in the web era is happening in ten months with AI.
Which means every month spent evaluating your options is like sitting out an entire year of the internet revolution.
Here’s the part that really gets me. People aren’t hesitating because they don’t see the opportunity. They’re hesitating because they see it too clearly. It’s so big, so transformative, that they get paralyzed by the fear of doing it wrong. They end up optimizing for perfection in a world that rewards iteration.
What I Learned Building My First Company With Zero Clue What I Was Doing
The winners weren’t the ones with the best plans. They were the ones willing to be wrong the fastest.
Every failure taught them something their competitors were still theorizing about. Every mistake handed them data their competitors didn’t have. Every iteration put them further ahead of the people still sitting in strategy meetings.
So here’s the real question. What problem are you solving manually every single day that AI could probably handle in the time it took you to read this?
Stop researching. Stop comparing. Stop waiting for the right moment. Pick that problem, find a tool, and give it a shot.
Because while you’re planning your perfect AI strategy, someone else is building an imperfect AI solution that’s about to make your perfect strategy irrelevant.
The internet taught me that being early and committed beats being late and perfect, every single time. AI is teaching me that same lesson all over again.
The question is whether you’re going to learn it in real time, or watch from the sidelines.
The depth of the water doesn’t matter when you’re still standing on the shore.
— Mac
P.S. Remember when people said they’d wait until the internet got more mature? Yeah, neither do I.
