Hey everyone,

And a special welcome to the 7 new readers who signed up since last week!

A week of illness is not ideal for my productivity, especially for a Type A person like myself who never feels like I’ve done enough, even on my best days…

I had to really dial it back this week to the bare minimum while I recovered.

But I came across a video packed with startup wisdom that convinced me to publish rather than skip.

Today, I'll be talking about four lessons I learned from Aaron Levie, the founder of Box, on how founders need to operate to win in the age of AI.

Own the next decade

Aaron Levie founded Box in 2005 after dropping out of college. He’s built and run Box for basically half his life through multiple tech waves.

One might expect him to have startups waxed. Counterintuitively, he now spends 70% of his time learning from the new generation of AI-first founders.

His core insight is that AI startups operate very differently from other eras of startups because AI has upended the operating model.

Here are his four key lessons for how founders can own the next decade.

1) Become an orchestrator

Back in 2005, Box’s speed of execution was limited by one thing: How fast the founders could type.

Founders today don't type code anymore. Instead, AI agents write the code, and humans review it. Founders have become managers of AI agents.

The bottleneck for startup founders has completely shifted, going from how fast I can physically type into a keyboard to how well I can integrate AI agents into my workflow and review their output.

This creates a new type of leverage for founders. Leverage that eliminates the constraint of one keyboard, one terminal or one IDE.

Products like Cursor’s Cloud Agents or Claude Code allow founders to deploy countless agents across their codebase, let them work in the background, and review their outputs when the agents are done.

2) Strategy is the new execution

A startup's edge has always been speed. Founders are notorious for hacking something together, getting it to market, and iterating rapidly based on customer feedback.

Today, with the growing capabilities of coding agents, hacking something together is becoming commoditised. Founders need to find a new edge in strategic clarity.

The concept of garbage in, garbage out holds true here. Yes, agents can build at the speed of light, but if they're building off of garbage context, their output will be garbage. For high-quality outputs, agents need precise specifications.

What leads to precise specs? Founders who know exactly what they want to build and have impeccable taste for product quality.

Some hard questions that will help founders gain strategic clarity:

• What am I really trying to build?

• What architecture best suits this product?

• Is there a real market opportunity for this idea?

3) Rethink market opportunities

Visualise a matrix.

On the x-axis are job functions, and on the y-axis are different industries. Each intersection is an individual market opportunity for an AI startup.

This is Levie's profound startup market framework for the age of AI. If this framework becomes a reality, thousands of $1-10 billion companies will emerge.

This framework brings to mind Jevons' Paradox.

Imagine a legal clerk whose human counterpart used to cost $1,000 or $2,000 per hour, now costing $5 or $10 per hour because of AI agents.

With a 90% reduction in cost, companies will deploy agents at scale for this function purely because it's now way more affordable.

I think many people struggle to get their minds around this concept of latent demand. The cheaper a resource becomes, the greater the demand for it.

It’s happened throughout history. Think of televisions, automobiles and aeroplanes.

And now… human labour…

4) Distribution rules

Levie’s view is that AI transforms product, not distribution.

The fundamentals are unchanged:

• Consumer? You need to figure out viral growth.

• Enterprise? You need a go-to-market machine.

• Technical/self-serve audience? Product-led growth.

Real distribution is owning an audience. Successful founders will be those who build a community so passionate about what they’re building that they have permanent access to that relationship.

While the above seems compelling, I found it interesting that Levie said he could easily be wrong on this point in 5 years.

There is always one caveat that we can never forecast accurately how these things will play out. No matter how much insight we think we have.

Ultimately, the next decade belongs to AI-first builders who:

1. Orchestrate agents to do the work

2. Prioritise strategic clarity over speed

3. Can unlock latent demand hidden in plain sight

4. Owns their distribution and customer relationship

There’s never been a better time to be building something new.

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Thanks for reading,

— Luca

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Get your free AI audit: If you’re still manually doing work that AI could handle in minutes, I'll show you exactly where you're bleeding time and money. In 25 minutes, I'll audit your current workflow and map out your personalized AI transformation roadmap. This is the same process I used to save 15+ hours per week in my own business. 🤖

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That’s it from me. See you next week, Luca 👋

P.P.S Let’s connect on LinkedIn and X.