Paul Graham used small teams to create an online store generator at Viaweb, which he sold to Yahoo and no longer operated. Since 2005, Y Combinator has exchanged small checks for early equity, formalizing the method of "founders personally doing things that cannot be scaled." Early founders of Airbnb took photos themselves, and early founders of Stripe manually set up payments for customers, both using manual work to fill gaps when human speed was insufficient for growth.

The capital path is to make bulk bets on software that can bypass slow processes. YC does not buy factories; it buys companies that harvest interfaces from manual steps in the industry. This speech pushes the same logic to the extreme: if agents can perform actions that previously required queuing simultaneously, those steps that charge fees solely because humans cannot act quickly will lose their pricing power. He did not announce a new fund but indicated that the premise of the existing portfolio is changing.

A comparable example is how email broke through the telegraph's per-word billing, and high-frequency trading broke through manual order placement. The disappearance of the telegraph office and floor brokers does not mean demand has vanished, but rather that the speed threshold has disappeared. The current situation is not about the expansion phase of a particular startup but about Graham defining human operational speed as a hidden parameter that is about to be tested.

Structurally, this is technological substitution. Pricing power used to reside with levels that could tolerate slowness and charged based on it. If agents change the number of items from human-days to concurrency, if reviews, customer service, applications, and content supply still operate under human speed quotas, they will first accumulate and then lose necessity. If substitution only occurs in software that can close the loop, licenses and responsibilities will still be priced per person; if concurrency covers these areas, headcount will no longer be the denominator of the rate.

ABAB News · Cognitive Laws

Many businesses exist simply because others cannot act quickly.
Once the speed limit disappears, queuing fees will vanish.
Inability to scale, once a moat, can also become a failure.