Dispatch
Paul Graham's 'Making Startups Powerful' tells founders to optimize for power, and mentions AI agents as a coming class of API user
The new essay argues founders should chase structural power — owning the money flow and the customer relationship, network effects, going full-stack against former customers, becoming a marketplace — over incremental profit, using PayPal's accidental pivot and Stripe's acquire-at-inception strategy as the worked examples. He flags AI agents as API consumers whose needs are unknown ('Who knows what they'll want to do?') and suggests letting users opt into training your model on their interactions as a network-effect mechanism. He also warns off 'mafia' markets like record labels and PBMs where a better product does not win.
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