A new breed of founders is on the rise

A new breed of founders is on the rise.

Working with early-stage startups, I’m seeing more and more non-technical founders who no longer wait for an agency quote or a technical cofounder to get started.

They build their first product themselves — leveraging AI. Ideas that might have died at the estimation stage are now being tested directly with users. They’re not trying to build the perfect system. They’re trying to answer a simple question:

Does anyone actually want this?

For that, tools like Lovable, Cursor, or Claude have proven incredibly effective. Web pages start to line up. Core functionalities come to life.

Early adopters finally have something to interact with. Instead of pitching an idea, founders can now put a working demo in front of real users and test if there is actual traction behind their business model.

As long as it’s just a test, this approach makes perfect sense.

But something interesting happens once real users get involved.

Even if the code hasn’t changed, what’s being operated is no longer just an experiment. Other people now interact with the system. They trust it with their time — sometimes their data, occasionally their own workflows.

At this point, the nature of the project evolves.

From validation to operation.

And this is often where technical leadership starts to make sense — not necessarily to build from scratch, but to support the transition from idea to product.