When Distractions are Everywhere, Focus Wins
We live in an age of distractions.
Geopolitical distractions. Social media distractions. Prediction markets and crypto degens and brainrots and, and, and…
Remember that time a VC’s streamlining measure caused an entire country’s tech sector to screech to a halt?
Oh yeah…and there’s that whole AI thing:
“Have you tried the latest Claude Code?”
“My Mac Mini arrives tomorrow, I can’t wait to get Clawdbot going”
“It’s not called Clawdbot anymore, it’s Moltbot!”
The rate of advancements that are coming at us as a result of AI is nothing short of astonishing. But for founders, it can be a major distraction.
I remember sitting at YC’s W2025 demo day last March when Garry Tan stood in front of the crowd and declared that 25% of the companies in the batch had 95% of their code generated by LLMs. During the course of the day, company after company went on stage with a pitch that included a line like this:
“We wrote our first line of code 3 weeks ago, and…”
Almost everyone in the audience was enamored by how much progress these companies had made in such a short amount of time. But my mind went elsewhere. As someone who spent years working within accelerators, I knew that underneath every such statement was another one:
“We just pivoted 3 weeks ago…”
And that’s what I heard again and again over the course of the day,
“We pivoted 3 weeks ago, and…”
“We pivoted last month, and…”
“We pivoted last week, and…”
Despite meeting numerous incredible founders and amazing companies that day, I left the Palace of Fine Arts with a singular thought stuck in my head: AI is going to be a super power for some founders and will absolutely undermine the focus of many more.
Since then, I’ve seen the results time and time again:
Pre-revenue companies pivoting left, right, and centre around whatever excites them.
Companies who change what they’re doing after not finding an excited customer after…3 tries.
Too many founding teams throwing the baby out with the bathwater time and time again.
For every team I meet that found a new opportunity as a result of AI, there are 10 more who couldn’t stay focused enough to push through the natural challenges of getting to product-market fit.
On the one hand, I get it. New technologies are exciting! Most of us got into this because we really like to build things. But the easier it is to just “start over”, the harder it is to persevere.
These days, my timeline is filled with posts from founders who built X or automated Y after chugging red bull all night. And that’s cool! But does it solve your customer’s pain point?
You know…the one you founded the company to solve?
Unless you’re building dev tools, those customers are probably going to have the same problem on Monday that they did on Friday. The latest AI model or open source agent didn’t change that.
By all means try new things. Spend time to test the new models and try the new toys. But for the love of god constrain the amount of time you spend doing that. If you started a company to solve a pain point that you’re passionate about, keep your eye on the prize (provided, of course, that you continue to believe that pain point matters).
And if you find yourself spending more time on the shiny new thing than you are on solving your customer’s pain points, think about that too.
In an age of distractions, the winners will be the ones who stay focused.
Now, where’s my Mac Mini…
