Olav Pekeberg

AI coding agents can now deliver one-shot custom apps straight to your phone. It’s the beginning of the end for the iPhone’s dominance.

A bespoke software revolution? I don't buy it. It'll exist. It already exists. Small consultants and big consulting firms have made custom software for years. It almost always sucks. It’s bloated, confusing, and because the client pays, it’s built wrong in all the ways. Who’s excited about bespoke software? Software makers! Of course they're excited about building bespoke software — that's what they do. X is full of them. Your feed is full of people who love making software talking about making software. Of course they’re excited about the revolution. Echo, echo, echo... Most people don’t like computers. Nobody in tech wants to say that out loud. People tolerate computers. They use them because they have to. Given the choice, most would rather not think about them at all. So when someone suggests that AI means everyone will build their own custom tools, ask who "everyone" is. The three-person accounting firm drowning in client paperwork? They want the paperwork gone, not a new system to maintain. The regional logistics company with 40 trucks? They want the routes optimized, not Joe spouting off about this new system he’s been messing around with. The law firm billing 70-hour weeks? They want leverage on their time, not a software project to design. They don’t hate technology. But building and maintaining their own critical systems isn’t their wheelhouse, regardless of how much faster and easier it’s become. It's another job on top of the job. Will these people use AI? Absolutely, for all sorts of things. Will some outliers go deep and build real custom systems? Sure, but they're almost always people who already had some pull toward software. The curiosity was already there. They were dabblers before. Giving everyone access to software building tools doesn't mean everyone becomes a builder. A powerful excavator doesn't turn a homeowner into a contractor. Most people just want the hole dug by someone else. They don’t want the responsibility either.

Disagree: I manually entered all of our monthly metrics and financials into a spreadsheet by hand for a couple years at Spellbook. The act of “soaking” in data like this builds strong intuition about the pulse of a business. Glancing at automated reports does not do the same thing. But i am very excited about being able to build ad hoc models with AI very fast for scenario planning. But the output I want is a spreadsheet i can soak in.

the most underrated hire right now is a great product person. when i say product person i'm def not talking about a product manager. perhaps i think there has to be somewhat of a new role. i don't have a good name for it yet but maybe something like "product thinker".. someone with an intuitive grasp of the product as it exists, where it's soft, where it sings, & how to iterate it toward something even sharper. in some sense, this person has to cohesively hold in their head where this product should be 2 years from now & work backwards from that. i say this cuz when building was hard, engineering was the bottleneck & the status hierarchy often reflected that. building is no longer hard. which means the variance in outcomes has shifted almost entirely to judgment on what to build, how to sequence it, & how to talk about it. & the story matters as much as the thing. internally, it organizes the team around a shared model of why. externally, it shapes the interpretive frame users bring to their first experience. you can't retrofit narrative onto a product & expect it to land, it has to be load bearing from the start. the rarest version of this person sits at the intersection of culture & deep technology. someone genuinely bilingual. they know what's technically possible & they know which cultural currents are real vs. ephemeral. that combo is what separates products that feel inevitable from products that feel assembled. before ppl clap back with this person has always been valuable, i know.. i am just saying now they might be the most *important* person in the room. their value compounds like never before.

Wealth taxes on unrealized gains don’t tax the rich. They tax ambition and export it How this plays out: >be a danish founder >start a company >struggle through all the hardships, near-death moments, sleepless nights >company gets valued at 500M DKK, a real success story >nobody has made liquid money, just salaries >they own 80%, now valued at 400M DKK on paper >tax man arrives and wants his cut >no shares sold, no liquidity event, just paper number on a cap table >forced to sell shares at the worst time or borrow money just to pay the bill >instead they pack up and move to Sweden or Switzerland >denmark loses the founders, the team, the tax base, the future jobs >all danes lose from it