# How AI is affecting startup founders worries (scares) me... #FounderFriday

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Ed Kang (CFXO)
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AczMqvvssz0
- **Дата:** 17.04.2026
- **Длительность:** 13:29
- **Просмотры:** 448
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/50903

## Описание

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## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

We need to talk about how AI, specifically LLMs, are making you a worse founder and they are preventing you from going out and developing your startup and achieving that optionality on whether you can raise funding or you've got enough revenue that you can bootstrap your way so you can build that unicorn Y O unicorn, which I define as a startup not based on investor expectations, but based on your objectives, what you want out of your startup, what you want as far as your lifestyle, your finances. That's what a Y O unicorn is all about. I'm not saying don't raise money. What I am saying is build in the optionality to determine what you want to do versus allowing an investor to get on your cap table and control your life. I'm also not saying all investors are bad and control freaks. I work with some great investors myself, but I am saying there are a lot of pretty bad investors out there and do you want to take the chance? Let's talk about how LLMs are affecting you on this path to success. Welcome to another Founder Friday where I give you my unfiltered thoughts as a startup advisor. Going to skip the introduction. Instead, I want to talk about four levels of how LLMs are making you a worse founder. The first level is AI ignorance. That's when founders completely ignore the benefit of using AI and they'd rather go to a person before going to an LLM assistant and getting questions answered. This habit of wanting to go to someone to make your life easier because it's easier to ask is going to be detrimental long-term to your future success as a startup founder because you have to be immersed into all the tools. You need to be learning and become AI fluent. I see this on Reddit all the time and yes, there's AI slop everywhere where people are just writing posts and comments with AI. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the fundamental questions that someone could have asked any free LLM and educating themselves so they could have a meaningful conversation on social media and get help. Instead of everybody having to just explain the basics over and over again. It's crazy making. The same questions are asked over and over again. You might as well go and say what would Reddit tell me about this question. LLMs are fantastic for preparing you for real life conversations. They make those conversations much more efficient, effective, and meaningful. And when a startup founder comes to me and doesn't do their homework up front, we just end up wasting our time talking about things that you could have just easily looked up. A simple Google search, asking a question there would have set you up better for the conversation that we need to have and that's what I'm looking for when I work with founders. The second problem that is becoming more and more pervasive is when founders basically become a human wrapper to an LLM. This behavior contributes to all the AI slop out there and creates AI slop startups where people are just pumping things out because an LLM says it's a good idea. Of course the LLM's going to tell you it's a good idea. ChatGPT is completely guilty of this and they've admitted it. They want you to keep talking to ChatGPT. So that's why ChatGPT is going to affirm all the cognitive biases in your head and make you seem like a genius as you live in your own echo chamber as you start coding away, you're vibe coding, and every single time you add a new feature or voila, like magic, it happens right before your very eyes because of coding agents, you reinforce this cognitive bias in your head that you're an amazing founder and you move into complete denial, which is the first stage of the five stages of grief that you're going to go through because you go through denial thinking that you're all that a bag of chips and then after that you're going to get angry because you're going to realize it's not the case and then you'll start to bargain and try to work your way around it, start making up excuses, start spinning the story, then you'll get depressed and finally you'll accept maybe you should have put deeper thought into talking to the LLM and not being a human wrapper, but making sure that the LLM gives you the opportunity as per what we talked about in problem one, talking to LLMs first to prepare so that you validate your startup with real people. It gets even worse when generally people pass off what they got from an LLM as their own expertise. And there are tools coming out where people are a lot more weary and a lot more savvy on sussing those things out and that's why you want to avoid it because you don't want to get clumped in to the mediocre middle with all the other founders. If anything, reverse it. Make the AI be a wrapper around you. Make the AI scale you. Take what you know, your domain expertise, and your skills and translate them into agents that will scale you. The repetitive tasks that you do that you're an expert at, put them in an agent because eventually you're going to be obsolete anyway for those skills and now you can rely on who you are, the person you are, your own personal brand, how you relate to people in a way that people trust to use your tools. That's the battle you want to fight. So don't be a human wrapper around an LLM, make the LLM wrapper around you. The third is what I call AI derangement syndrome. That's when people get so sensitive

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

about AI that they just poo everything. They become toxic in their way that they interact with AI instead of having a meaningful nuanced conversation of the benefit in our lives. Let's go back to Reddit, one of my favorite places to hang out and I've got a seriously complicated relationship with that social media platform, but it helps me understand how people are behaving. Yes, someone might have used AI to put out an AI slop post and you can see it a mile away, but the reason for that post and why it exists is important to look past the AI and get to the true intent of why people want to put that message out in the first place. But instead you have all these people with AI derangement syndrome coming out and saying this is just AI slop and they completely ignore the opportunity that is right before them. The irony is that AI is everywhere, yet people are choosing to become doomers either because they want some credibility, they're trying to get attention themselves by polarizing the audience and they're missing out. And they also look like ignorant jerks and are at a risk, a very high risk, of being left behind because they're not willing to participate in the community, in a discourse of how AI fits into our lives. I've had founders in the past with AI derangement syndrome come and say, "Did you write this or did an AI write this? " And my question is, "Does it really matter if it solves your problem? " And then they retort and say, "I paid to talk to a real life human being instead of an AI. " And guess what? I still use AI for everything, but I manually type things out and spend more time just to make it more human with grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes, you name it. I start dirtying up my AI responses to make sure that I avoid triggering AI derangement syndrome. And I understand where this comes from. I get it. People are worried that AI is replacing them or that they're not going to have the human connections. There's a lot of threat, a lot of insecurity out there right now because a lot of people are not willing to turn that corner and adapt to AI. People don't like change. That's what they say, but it's technically not true. Everybody loves change if it's positive. What people don't like is the pain involved with appropriate change to be adaptive. And AI is challenging all of us with these mental models that create psychological and emotional friction and some people are not handling very well. This derangement syndrome comes in and you are at risk of being left behind if you are constantly attacking or poo pooing AI or you're ignoring people just because it looks like AI. That's not the way to go. You want to be open to the future of possibilities because it's benefiting you now whether you know it or not, but take it all with a grain of salt and know that we're just at the beginning of this conversation. Things will definitely look different and you want to participate in shaping that future because it's good for you, good for your startup, and good for the rest of us. The final level of how LLMs are affecting founders is something that I never thought I would experience. I read about it, I heard about it, all the anecdotes were there, but until I experienced it myself, it didn't really dawn on me, but it slapped me right in the face, hit me right between the eyes. And it's called LLM or AI psychosis. This is when someone interacts with AI so much they lose grip on reality and have a psychotic break. And I've had founders come and tell me that they're convinced that they've created the next breakthrough. They've solved fundamentally an incredibly difficult problem and they've discovered like new elements and new equations and new formulas and new theories just because they prompted the LLM in a specific way. They cracked the code. I've had founders come convinced that I need to be their advisor because they asked an LLM about me. And yes, I am ranking in LLMs. LLMs do find my material and I show up now and then. It's part of GEO, generative engine optimization. It's something that I work on proactively. But where the psychosis occurs is when they come talk to me and they're so presumptuous expecting me to be their advisor. They put me in their pitch deck, they've written me in their business plans, and they tell me everything that AI tells them to talk to me about to know that I'm supposed to be their advisor. And you may be thinking, "Well, Ed, isn't that a good problem to have? Why are you complaining? " But it's when that founder is unadvisable because they're in this psychotic break because of the LLM. They're not listening and they're not founders I want to be around because it just makes me feel weird and it's creepy. It's the equivalent of going to that really pretty girl that you've liked for a long time after you went to a fortune teller and that fortune teller took your money and said, "Absolutely, you are going to marry that person. " And you went to that girl and you said, "I'm convinced that we're going to get married because the fortune teller told me. It's destiny. It's been foretold. " How do you think she's going to react? Most likely, she's going to get a restraining order against you and sometimes that's how I feel about how specific founders come and approach me. They come in hot and it is a very uncomfortable situation. But the worst is when there's a break from reality and founders build up their cognitive biases to a point where that denial is so thick, so entrenched, they are never

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 13:00) [10:00]

going to see the forest for the trees. They're never going to maneuver out of that, and I think that's an incredible shame. I think that stunts you as a founder, and every one of us has to be careful about it. I admit myself, there's been times where my ChatGPT or Claude says something to me and I go, "Hmm, that sounds really good. " But then I stop and tell myself, I better trust this yet verify with actual real people because I could be wasting a lot of time, a lot of money, lose my reputation, and completely get into that place where I have my own psychotic break, and I'm no good to anybody as a founder or as an advisor. Now, I've got good news and bad news. Let's start with the bad. All of this is only going to get worse as AI starts to get better. Some people may say AI on its acceleration curve of improving itself is a good thing. Other people are going to take it really poorly. My son, just the other day, told me his belief that people who legitimately have AI companions that consider AI to be a relationship replacement for real people, he thinks they all have a mental illness. He was being very blunt and very reductive. And I want to say to him, hold on, wait a second, let's step back, take a nuanced approach, and explore why people are in this situation to begin with. What problems have they had that they have not been able to solve that makes them go and have a romantic relationship, break up literally with real people, real spouses, and begin courting or having a relationship of all various degrees and levels. If you haven't seen the movie Her, this is a really great example, and it's becoming a scary reality. We need to look at why, and we need to empathize, understand. The good news is this is an opportunity for the thoughtful founder, for you out there, to go and analyze the context of AI, the implications of rapidly accelerating technology, and potentially AGI, how that affects us as people, and then start to create solutions that solve the problems that AI has been creating all the way up to this point in time. Because as things get worse, people will get hungrier for the solutions out there. So, if you can use AI to help people have a real connection, I joke about this all the time. Facebook is going to become the most valuable startup once again, and I don't mean the Mark Zuckerberg Meta Facebook. I'm talking about seeing a face, connecting with a real face, a real person, and holding a real book, and getting back to reading. If AI can help us augment that and get back to real meaningful connections instead of being sucked into this imaginary world that AI creates for us, we're going to avoid Ready Player One where we're jacked into machines that basically keep us placated and happy and give us work by playing video games in the metaverse, and getting to the point where maybe we are in that utopian future where it's Star Trek and we're exploring new civilizations or flying around on spaceships and we're having a grand old time. I don't know how it works. I don't have a crystal ball, but I think the best thing is to be prepared for both and take advantage of all the opportunities that come from the pathway to either situation. want you to step back and really analyze your LLM habits and how they're affecting you. Maybe go talk to a real person, someone who can see your blind spots, a coach, a friend, a co-founder, another advisor, or at least other founders, and share what you're experiencing, and let them watch your back so you don't fall into any of these four pitfalls, and you don't experience more problems than what are already a part of startups. It's hard enough as it is. Let's make life a little bit easier. That's why you're here, and that's why I appreciate you hanging out with me in this video. I'll see you in the next Founder Friday.