Building on boring strength

Sam Altman said the quiet part out loud: most AI startups are elaborate, expensive demos. He’s right. And the boring answer to why is also an interesting one: distribution. Yes, data matters, but distribution begets data. In AI, the center of gravity isn’t the model; it’s the means to get real usage at scale.

Peel back “distribution,” and it’s not just reach. Reach to prospects buys attention. Reach to existing customers buys something rarer – the continuous stream of edge cases that turn a demo into a product. Those edge cases are the curriculum for your evals; they stress every assumption you made in the lab. Early access to distribution shortens the distance between “this is cool” and “this actually works,” because your error modes are revealed by people whose daily workflows are far messier than your demo script.

Craft still matters. If I had to rough out a split for AI product work today: 30% taste, 20% model selection, 20% evals, 30% engineering discipline. The playbooks for models, evals, and infra will harden; taste will stay stubbornly human. It’s the difference between “I tolerated it” and “I came back.” A week on a utilitarian setup – call it the corporate default stack – and I ran back to a more thoughtfully designed browser like an atheist finding God after stubbing my life on hard edges. Taste is not frosting; it’s the surface where the product meets a person’s time, attention, and tolerances.

Here’s the structural rub. The AI platform shift asks for a radical point of view and a re-architecting of processes, not a feature veneer. Incumbents earned distribution by being reliably incremental – town planners with drawings and SOPs. Startups, when they work, are pirates with nerve and taste. The planner codifies what works; the pirate questions why we do it that way at all. In AI, you need both: radicalism to rethink the workflow, and reliability to carry it through change management, security, and procurement.

That’s why “taste × distribution” beats either one alone. Startups without distribution plateau at demo. Incumbents without taste ship incrementalism dressed up as AI. Put them together and two things happen on day one: real customers surface real corners, and the product team gains a disciplined feedback loop that’s richer than any synthetic eval. Incumbents stay relevant; startups stop LARPing product-market fit.

The quiet advantage in “boring” industries. If you run a business where “nothing ever happens,” you likely hold the scarcest input to AI productization: trusted distribution into workflows thick with nuance. Your customer base, your legacy data, your service footprint—these are not millstones; they’re moats, waiting for a partner who brings taste, radical POV, and the willingness to be measured by outcomes.

What the partnership looks like in practice. Not a vendor in Coupa, but a brother-in-arms. Joint eval loops anchored in your edge cases. Data access designed as secure, auditable clean rooms. KPIs that reflect operational truth – time to resolution, variance reduction, first-pass yield – rather than vanity metrics. A staged path from pilot to production, with explicit “kill or scale” gates. And contracts that align incentives for non-linear upside: shared learnings, co-owned IP in tightly defined domains, revenue-share where value creation is provable. This is how demos become systems.

Eighteen months ago, my team bet on this thesis in traditional verticals. The lesson is simple: you cannot build meaningful AI companies in these categories without deep, durable partnerships. Distribution isn’t an afterthought you tack on post-demo; it’s the proving ground that makes the product true.

So, if you’re an executive at a big, allegedly uneventful company, recognize what you already possess. You don’t need to act like a startup to matter in AI. You need to invite one in – on terms that respect your reliability and amplify their radicalism. Bring the pirates into the town hall. Hand them your edge cases. Demand craft, not theater. And insist that the outcome is something a planner would sign, a pirate would build, and your customers would willingly live with every day.

Call it a pact between taste and distribution. Either way, it’s the only reliable way to graduate from demo to company.

Enjoy your Sunday!