The next tech substrate is snapping into focus: AI coding, programmable money, autonomous agents

Jason Rosenthal
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Every generation of great companies is built on a substrate the previous generation couldn’t see.

The companies that define an era rarely invent the infrastructure beneath them. They find it — underappreciated, misread as a toy or a threat — and they build at a speed and scale that wasn’t possible the day before. Founders who recognize this have an unfair advantage.

Web2’s substrate came in three pieces:

  • The public cloud cheapened servers, which in turn collapsed the time and capital required to turn an idea into a live product. The cost of being wrong dropped, and so did the cost of trying again. Entire categories of company became possible not because the ideas were new, but because the infrastructure finally made the economics work.
  • Social networks rewrote distribution. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube handed founders something unprecedented: direct access to hundreds of millions of people at near-zero marginal cost. Customer acquisition, long a moat reserved for incumbents with massive budgets, suddenly belonged to anyone with a compelling product, a growth loop, and the discipline of continuous optimization.
  • The smartphone acted as the third leg of the stool. Always on, always connected, it expanded the addressable market for digital services beyond anything Web1 founders could have hoped for. New behaviors, new categories — mobile gaming, on-demand delivery, the creator economy — emerged not from invention but from a platform that billions of people carried everywhere, all the time.

Infrastructure. Distribution. Platform. Each was individually significant. Together, they created the  Cambrian explosion of Web2.

That substrate is now being replaced. And the new one has snapped into focus.

  • AI-assisted coding is doing for software creation what the cloud did for deployment. The cost and time required to build is collapsing. Founders who couldn’t afford engineering teams are shipping products. Small teams are doing what previously required large ones. The leverage available to a builder today is categorically different from anything that existed even 6 months ago.
  • Programmable money is increasing the global velocity of capital. Stablecoins, tokenized assets, and high-performance blockchains are not a speculative asset class — they are financial infrastructure. The missing layer builders have been reaching for since the dawn of the internet. Micropayments, coordination mechanisms for global communities, programmable incentives, borderless settlement, assets that move at the speed of software: these are the foundation for entirely new categories of economic activity. The companies that built on new payment rails in the early 2000s created enormous value. Companies that build natively on programmable money will make that look like a warmup.
  • The third piece is autonomous agents. We are early, but the trajectory is clear. Agents are becoming actors in the economy, not just tools for human ones. They call APIs, deploy capital, execute transactions, commission services. When agents become a meaningful user base in their own right, the demand they generate for applications and infrastructure will dwarf what was possible when users were limited to people who owned a smartphone. The internet economy was built for human attention. The agent economy will be built for something faster, larger and self reinforcing.

In every generation of tech, there is a window. It opens when new infrastructure makes new things possible, easy and cheap. The cost of experimentation falls and the size of the opportunity grows. The founders who recognize it build the companies that define the next decade.

The next window is open and founders are mobilizing. Things are about to get spicy. 

 

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