Metadata
- Author: Benn Stancil
- Full Title:: All You Can Do Is Play the Game
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://benn.substack.com/p/all-you-can-do-is-play-the-game
- Read date:: 2025-11-15
Highlights
When someone says “I don’t know,” what does it mean? There are levels to it: (View Highlight)
The VC, when it matters. They again think that they know what to do, but this time, they don’t want to be responsible for it. Yes, they grandstanded for ten minutes about their idea, and then defended it for ten minutes more, but they started their lecture by saying “Look, I don’t know what’s best here.” And they can’t be held accountable for anything they say after that—unless, of course, things go well, in which case, remember how this was their idea? (View Highlight)
The next huge business is a really good context layer that collects the same documents and emails, and exposes them to ChatGPT or Claude. There’s no money in building another chatbot, people say; all the money is in giving existing chatbots better data. There is no AI strategy without a data strategy, people say; the way to get the most out of AI is to comprehensively integrate all of your data together, in a carefully defined semantic ontology. (View Highlight)
The next huge business is a huge bucket of loose text files. Ontologies and semantic layers get bitter lessoned, and the companies that try to cleverly integrate data are steamrolled by those that stuff every corporate communication into one giant folder that LLMs can read from. (View Highlight)
Or, none of this works. Copilots make analysts marginally more efficient; the agents never answer meaningful questions. Companies use LLMs to search through their messages and notes, but the models never do productive analysis. Nobody buys the chatbots and everything stays BI, because charts were all that people ever wanted anyway. (View Highlight)
whatever changes happen in the data world over the next five years will also happen because of similar accidents. People have already tried to build that entire list of products in the previous section, with varying degrees of success. (View Highlight)
To figure out what a blog post is about, you have to write it first. (View Highlight)
Epiphanies come from typing, not thinking. (View Highlight)
Analogously, in a way—Cursor was founded by recent college graduates. They were not hardened engineers who’d Seen Things; they were not part of some corporate mafia. They probably didn’t have a detailed corporate business plan about wedges, growth strategies, marketing channels, or their second step. (View Highlight)
Though Cursor no doubt did some clever things, the most important thing was that they did it at all. (View Highlight)
Generational riches, it turns out, also starts with typing, not thinking. (View Highlight)
Unfortunately, there is no music right now. The fog of AI—the wild randomness of today’s technological developments and of which products catch a viral updraft and which don’t—have silenced it. No IDC report on market sizing matters; no engineering fundamentals will save you when engineering becomes industrialized; no SaaS playbook works when nobody can say for sure that SaaS will even be around in ten years. Perhaps, no experience even matters. There is no such thing as a long term plan. There is just step one, and how you respond when the market tilts under your feet, and some new technical change punches you in the face. (View Highlight)