It's 2026. The cost of producing software is less than minimum wage. The US Petro Dollar is weakening. Last year the global BRICS alliance produced more GDP than the G7 for the first time in the world. We sanctioned Russia's SWIFT access and they survived. Countries are no longer forced to price oil in dollars. Countries don't want to use SWIFT anymore. Countries are buying gold again. The USA is going to war to fight to keep its monetary grasp on the world. The purchasing power of the dollar is 1/100th of what it used to be. Pax Americana is ending. When you price equities and commodities in a rapidly depreciating asset, everything looks like it goes up.
As the cost of software goes down, the high-margin businesses that came with software will start to die out. Before software there was no such thing as a high-margin business. Everything was a high-volume, low-margin, cost-of-goods-sold game. I expect AI to bring us back to this type of economy. Over the next 10 years VCs will begin to die out as margins are squeezed from every angle. Now you don't need to be an engineer to create a software business.
As a software engineer, the things you once loved have been taken from you. The machine is now better at most everything you used to love to do, and it gets better every day. You wait in anticipation for your comfy life and salary to disappear. You desperately look for places to put your assets that will protect you.
What to Build
If the US is going to maintain a globally respectable economic status, it needs to build things that improve people's lives. If the US builds applications that measurably improve the quality of life of its citizens, it will create shared national values and loyalty among its people.
Modern consumer applications make people so unhappy. Monetizing human attention should be a crime. The technology we have to do it is weapons-grade, and our brains don't stand a chance.
The good news is that we are leaving the parasitic consumer app era and will be back on track to building software that actually improves people's lives. We can finally de-shitify the internet. The bad news is, your ability to write software doesn't give you a better shot at building it than anyone else.
What software actually improves your life? There are only three meaningful consumer applications that are a step function from where we are now. All of them are aggregators of existing services. You know what sucks about the internet? The fact that you have to context-manage 4 social apps, 10 messaging apps, 3 brokerages, 1 mortgage, and five health trackers. The context management of everything plus the constant fight for your attention makes you feel like each app is a crying baby vying for your attention. This makes using the internet feel more like a battle than something that actually helps people. Almost all the applications can be distilled into three broad verticals. The only remaining positive-sum game of innovation in software is to attack the margins of these businesses. These verticals are like tech trees for the US economy. The three verticals are:
- Information (message aggregator)
- Finance (money aggregator)
- Health (wellness aggregator)
The thing about all of these is that all the companies you want to aggregate don't want to be aggregated and will do everything in their power to stop you from doing so. Go fuck 'em up—there is a trillion-dollar harpoon pointed at the Mag 7. All of these will importantly converge to low-margin, high-volume businesses. All of these depend on a strong but soveriegs digital identity.
Information
What if your social apps weren't always trying to monetize your attention and actually were designed to help you communicate and process important information? What if news organizations followed their constitutional obligation to have your interests in mind? What if you had a single messaging application, not ten? It has been said for years now that we are living through World War Three—the war on information. Most of the info slop on the internet is a result of the monetization of attention through targeted advertising. If you can build a system to meaningfully improve the quality of information presented to users, you can improve their lives. This is probably the first vertical to be built. Modern social media companies will fight you, rate-limit you, blacklist you, and even try to acquire you in your journey to build this.
Finance
Can we create a single useful holistic view of a person's finances without weaponizing it against them? A dashboard where your entire financial picture can be managed and owned by you. This is by no means a novel idea; many companies have been trying to do this for years (see Rocket Money, Mint, etc.). The problem is they are not vertically integrated enough to give you execution from one place—only visibility (still better than nothing). Sovereignty here is important, and the digitization of fiat currency is well on its way for this to come about. Financial organizations have built a legal swamp moat around themselves to prevent people like you and me from playing ball. Do you have a Series X license? Are you an accredited investor? Does your brokerage have FDIC insurance? The game here will be less a technical game and more of a legal one.
Empowering people's sovereignty is empowering.
Health
Aggregate all your biomarker sensors, your gym apps, your medical history, your blood work into something that is supportive of your vitality and longevity. Health applications suffer from a legal swamp in a different way. HIPAA compliance? There exists a legitimate technological challenge in gathering consistent health data and then transforming that into personalized insights. Despite the challenges here, I cannot think of an industry that could be more important to modernize and improve. The bar for quality healthcare/applications is so low and the opportunity to improve people's lives so great. There are opportunities in software here for sure, but much of the impact and long-tail benefit of improving this vertical lies in hardware. The opportunity to improve drug discovery and research on human aging and flourishing is unquantifiable. It feels good to feel good.
What could be a more honorable endeavor than helping people take better care of themselves?
Hardware
The main point of software on a long time horizon is to make better hardware. Unfortunately, the USA has forgotten how to manufacture physical things. After years of exporting the construction of physical goods overseas, the domain expertise has dwindled. However, there is a shift in the air. The genius of the Elon Cinematic Universe is in manufacturing real physical things. American Dynamism may yet bear fruit.
While I believe this to be the most important thing, it is also the most difficult. Building physical things is real engineering—it's hard because hardware is hard. Software is easy because it's soft; you can change it, fix it if it breaks. When hardware breaks, you need to build it again, sometimes from the beginning.
Chemical, biological, and physical manufacturing will be some of the most important industries in the world.