It's Time to Build

In the age of AI, the world belongs to the builders.

In 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote that “software is eating the world.” 14 years later, that line feels less like a prediction and more like a prologue, the opening chapter of a story that was only beginning to unfold. Software never finished eating the world. AI simply arrived with two forks and a much bigger appetite.

We are now in the early innings of a technological revolution: an era where agents write code, AI absorbs entry level workflows, and corporate ladders compress as software reduces operational complexity. If recruiting into this world feels disorienting, as if the air is shifting around you, it’s okay. That’s what it feels like to stand at the edge of a technological shift: fast, unfamiliar, and filled with opportunity.

Industry leaders have noted the magnitude of this moment. Jamie Dimon likens AI to the steam engine. Jensen Huang calls it “the dawn of a new industrial age.” Mark Zuckerberg has put Meta back into “wartime mode.” And Sergey Brin has returned to the lab after a decade away.

Moments like this do not reward hesitation. The protagonists of this era aren’t lingering on the sidelines; they are rushing forward to join the action.

Builders are the Protagonists

Each era tells a familiar story with new faces. The industrial age had John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and Thomas Edison. The internet age had Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and a guy in a garage wearing a black turtleneck. The cast changes, but the truth remains the same: The world is shaped by the people who build things. Will the AI age include you? 

While managers tend to what already exists, builders explore the frontier. They create value where it never existed before.

For most of the last century, value flowed from large institutions, org charts, and armies of people. Naval Ravikant describes the forms of leverage in this era as labor, capital, and media. But over the last half century, a new form of leverage emerged: code. Software empowered the builders, shifting gravity away from the skyscrapers toward small, determined teams. Zuck in a Harvard dorm room. Woz in a Silicon Valley garage.

AI is accelerating this trend. Today, the frontier is being pushed by small, focused teams with unreasonable ambition.

Look no further than some of the companies reshaping culture and markets today: OpenAI, Anduril, Cursor, ElevenLabs, Mercor, Perplexity, Saronic, Kalshi. Small teams having global impact.

FDR famously warned never to underestimate the person who overestimates themself. And Paul Graham once wrote that you can do great work with a surprisingly small group of people. In the age of AI, what are you capable of? Who will you build with? 

The World has Changed

Most people don’t grasp how profoundly AI has altered the physics of creation. You can design, test, launch, refine, and ship at a pace that would have seemed impossible a decade ago. What once took a quarter can now unfold over a single weekend.

This shift is redefining what it means to be a founder. Brian Halligan, Co-Founder of HubSpot, recently coined the term “five tool founder,” which is someone who can code, design, sell, recruit, and strategize. This kind of breadth is exactly what HBS has always tried to cultivate, and the world is now rewarding it at unprecedented scale.

There has never been a moment in history when a single person could accomplish so much with so little.

That reality is changing the shape of a career. Today, the steepest learning curves, the fastest personal growth, and the most meaningful work live inside early-stage companies. The old sequence — learn, then do — has inverted. Now you must learn by doing, through friction and uncertainty, by building something real rather than studying it at a distance.

The data reinforces this. Paul Gompers’ research shows that even failed founders land in higher level roles than their peers. Building is the fastest way to learn, and the market rewards this, even when it doesn’t go according to plan. To build is to accelerate, are you ready to go faster?

Your Risk is Asymmetric

From the outside, starting something looks risky. But for an HBS graduate, your risk is fundamentally asymmetric. Your downside is limited, and your upside is uncapped.

As an HBS grad you have a floor beneath you: skills, brand, network, and a market that will always take your call. Few people in the world have access to this kind of insurance policy.

As Professor Reza Satchu likes to point out, this safety net creates opportunity to assume additional risk. You can afford to experiment. You can afford to learn by doing. You can afford to take the kind of swing that might actually touch the arc of humanity.

Meanwhile, the “safe path” is rapidly shifting beneath our feet. AI is absorbing associate workflows. Consulting playbooks are being rewritten by LLMs. Corporate ladders are flattening as software streamlines operations complexities that once required multiple layers of management.

Assuming risk is increasingly the rational choice. So in a world moving quickly, the greatest danger is not falling short. The greatest danger is standing still as the world leaves you behind.

Be the Protagonist

Every year, HBS brings together people who came here to lead into the future. But leadership today is no longer about preserving the status quo. Leadership in this era means building products, companies, systems, and tools. It means putting something into the world that wasn’t there before.

Peter Thiel argues that progress depends on zero-to-one leaps: creating products that are genuinely new and not incremental improvements. And Steve Jobs taught that the world is malleable, shaped by people who are no different from you except that they chose to create.

You are living through a moment about which your grandchildren will ask. Where were you during the AI revolution? Did you watch it unfold from the sidelines? Did you manage around the edges? Or did you help build what came next?

You don’t need a billion dollar idea. You don’t need a large team. You don’t need anyone’s blessing. You only need to begin. Start something or join an early-stage company. Ship something small. Test an idea. Take a chance on something that feels slightly uncomfortable. Forgo the allure of being the nth employee at a large firm and begin the 1-of-n journey reserved for builders.

Founders are the protagonists of progress. And right now, you have more leverage, more tools, more support, more upside, and more opportunity than any generation before you.

So go and build something interesting. Build something important. Build something impactful.

As Steve Jobs said, “We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here?”

Software is still eating the world, so go build something that tastes wonderful.

Eric Menser (MBA ‘27) hails from Stafford, Virginia. He graduated with a B.S. from the Air Force Academy. He then served as an officer in the Marine Corps. Prior to HBS, Eric worked at Palantir Technologies in the Office of the CEO and was an enterprise lead for startups.