How is AI affecting startups?

In a recent article Steve Blank talks about the 16th year of the startup class at Stanford and how AI has changed the way people work and build MVPs.

The key takeaways are:

1. The speed of building a new MVP and adding features is now so fast, it has overtaken the ability to validate the features. As Steve Blank puts it “The amount of product did not equal the amount of learning”. It is now easier than ever to loose sight of the real goal of a startup - to search for and validate ideas for sustainable businesses. The temptation is high to chat to an AI and build (what looks like) a working product with 100s of features without taking a step back and remembering that people “hire products to do jobs”.
2. As a further consequence of the above, with the ease of developing prototypes, many industries will now be inundated with companies trying to solve their problems. The original difficulty of making something that prevented entrants has now been removed.
3. AI is not great at discovering latent unmet needs. Using AI for user comms gives you the average of answers - which is definitely not what you want when trying discover something novel.
4. Companies are looking for their moat and how to protect it - seeing how AI is already disrupting markets - making initial startup conversation more difficult with existing companies.

Citations:

• https://steveblank.com/2026/04/22/ai-and-teaching-the-brave-new-world/