The founder's eye twitched when I asked about expansion plans. Eighteen months. $30M raised. Thousands using their AI (redacted) tool.
"We're thinking about adding email sequences next."
A company discovering their wedge had become their coffin.
The AI gold rush created a new disease. Every VC wants $1M ARR before Series A. Every founder knows the formula: wrap GPT-5, add auth, charge enterprise prices. You'll hit the milestone. You'll raise the round. You might never build a venture backable company.
VCs know this game. They fund thirty simple wedges knowing twenty-nine plateau at $5M. They're betting one accidentally builds something defensible. The rest become acquihires.
Most founders take the bait. Simple wedges are fundable. "AI for X" fits on a coffee napkin. "We're rebuilding the entire stack" sounds delusional.
The best companies choose delusion.
Figma spent years rebuilding design tools in the browser. Real-time collaboration required reimagining everything. Conflict resolution. Memory management. Rendering performance. They built a graphics engine while competitors shipped plugins. Now those competitors beg for API access to infrastructure they'll never replicate.
Notion questioned why documents and databases were separate. Custom state management. Proprietary sync engine. Block architecture nobody understood for three years. Now copycats discover their foundations crack under features Notion ships casually.
I learned this watching four startups die the same way. Each built on someone else's core value prop. When the underlying platform shifted, pivoted, or priced them out, they had nothing left. The wedge was never theirs.
Accelerator demo days prove the pattern. Thirty AI SDRs launch. Twenty-eight identical ChatGPT wrappers. Two integrated directly into their customers' CRMs, learning from every lost deal, every successful sequence, every objection pattern. OpenAI trains on public sales wisdom. Those two train on private deal outcomes. One improves generally. The other improves specifically for customers who pay them.
My test: Can your wedge alone hit $100M? No adjacent products. No platform story. Just the wedge.
Founders panic. They list adjacent features, expansion plans, ecosystem dreams. Confessing the wedge is a feature with a fundraising deck.
The trap springs at scale. Your biggest customer needs something your architecture can't deliver. Your team tweaks prompts instead of training models. You add chat widgets thinking movement equals progress. Each feature makes pivoting harder. Each customer makes changing impossible.
Your wedge becomes your destiny. Whatever customers think you are on day one, you're still fighting five years later.
Real wedges look narrow but go deep. Hard problems compound into competitive moats. Every technical decision matters. Every dependency you avoid becomes permanent advantage.
$1M ARR is a real achievement. It's also where most wedges reveal their ceiling. Meanwhile, someone else validated the same problem and went deep. Three years. No revenue. No metrics. Building what others can't copy.
That founder looks insane today.
The choice happens now. AI makes surface-level building easier than ever. The courage to go deep becomes everything.
Pick the wedge others can't build. Or become a line item in someone else's changelog.
At the very end, what matters is the true value which you create and the true problem you solve. If someone just makes an LLM wrapper, then at the very end it just helps in adding another pathway to channel your prompt/problem to the LLM working in hindsight.
Three years. No revenue. No metrics. Building what others can't copy.
That founder looks insane today.
That put the head on the pin....thank you for writing that