Instant software, instant IPOs, and the death of Wall Street gatekeepers

Before I start, please note I have no real AI experience, no financial markets experience, and honestly, no business making predictions about either. But here we are. These are just some thoughts. They might be bad, and I might change my mind tomorrow. Anyway.

echo "HEDGE FUND SIGNAL LOST... SYSTEM FAILURE DETECTED."
sleep 1
echo "MARKET CRASHING..."
for i in {5..1}; do
    echo "AI-TRADER LOSSES: $(($i * 20))%"
    sleep 0.5
done
echo "SYSTEM REBOOTING... NEW SCHEME REQUIRED."

AI is about to flatten the playing field in ways we aren’t ready for. Right now, building a software product requires some level of skill—coding, design, marketing, operations. Even no-code tools have a learning curve. But that’s all getting vaporized. Instead of hiring a team, you’ll just talk to an LLM and have a functional product in minutes. No engineers. No waiting months for a build. Just describe the thing, and it exists.

And when anyone can build anything instantly, the next obvious step is launching it. Normally, startups raise VC money, grind toward PMF, and maybe go public years later. But we’ve already seen what happens when people tokenize things too early—it mostly ends in chaos. Turns out, if you give people liquid, tradable assets before they’ve figured out a real product, you just create speculative messes with no long-term viability.

But here’s the shift: AI makes PMF way faster. Instead of taking years to tweak and iterate, you just keep prompting until you land on something that works. Execution speed goes from a limiting factor to a non-issue. If you find PMF in weeks instead of years, early tokenization actually starts making some sense. At that point, the only real requirement for launching a product is having a good idea and a convincing enough pitch.

So what happens? The startup pipeline—idea → build → launch—compresses into something nearly instant. More people will go straight to tokenization, skipping the traditional gatekeepers. At first, it’ll be a mess—tons of half-baked projects, speculation on vaporware, and a general flood of noise. But eventually, durable businesses will emerge, markets will adjust, and we’ll all look back and wonder why we ever needed VCs and IPO roadshows in the first place.