How To Build Companies When The Cost of Code Goes To Zero?

AI is doing to code what the assembly line did to manufacturing.

When the price of a good drops toward zero, what’s considered scarce shifts.

The constraint shifts from “How many engineers can we hire?” to “What can we build that others can’t instantly copy?”

Which is much harder.

Jacob Beckerman, the co-founder and CEO of Marco, on what that will do to software:

As AI coding agents improve, we’ll get more software, better software, and - counterintuitively - more open software.

His analogy: if code is dirt, hoarding it makes less sense; value moves to what you grow on it and how you arrange it.

Here’s what it means for founders:

1. Be much more ambitious!

Increasingly, whole categories collapse into a single tool.

E.g. note taking, canvas, email, internal chat (Notion, Superhuman, Slack, etc) can now be built so fast that it can all be combined into one platform by a young startup.

That’s exactly what Macro is doing.

Founders who target a small niche - and don’t move fast or think big enough - will be swallowed by those who do.

Tools for individual steps of a workflow aren’t nearly enough anymore.

You have to provide end-to-end workflow solutions that can automate more and more steps along the way.

On top, pick problems where demand is effectively infinite - coding, research, design - rather than finite ones like “summarize my 7 meetings a week.”

As costs fall, the infinite buckets expand; the finite ones just get cheaper.

1. Build more open software

As inputs commoditize, the winning pattern isn’t walled gardens - it’s ecosystems.

Macro is open‑sourcing almost everything and charging only for the hard, hairy parts: Native apps, trust and security plus an intelligence layer tuned to the product’s internal graph.

It sounds reckless but it changes the default from “stitch together 11 siloed tools” to “fork and extend a cohesive workspace.”

This lowers integration friction and raises surface area for community energy. Plus, it reduces incentives for others to enter the space.

1. Taste and brand matter

For years, SaaS brands converged on the same vibe:

White canvases, rounded sans‑serif, pastel gradients.

That worked when distribution and switching costs did the defending.

In a world of cheap code and abundant alternatives, brands have to get opinionated again. Be more like fashion brands than utilities.

Teams that win will be the ones that hire real taste (often from non‑traditional backgrounds) and give them authority. A small group with power and a strong point of view.

In summary, if code is getting cheap, build the company around a frontier to chase, a brand with a soul, and an intelligence layer that knows your world better than anyone else’s.

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Enjoyed reading this?

Then check out my conversation on the focal podcast with Jacob Beckerman, an ex AI researcher / now the founder and CEO of Macro ($32 million raised from a16z and Box Group).

Youtube | Apple Podcast | Spotify

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