The Smartest Thing I'm Doing Right Now Is Nothing

Everyone has an AI business idea right now.

AI DevOps. AI infrastructure. AI safety. AI agents for whatever vertical you can think of. Every week someone pitches me. Every week my LinkedIn shows another person who pivoted into "AI strategy."

I've said no to all of it.

Not because the ideas are bad.

Because my gut refuses. And my gut is smarter than my ambition.

The Pattern I Keep Seeing

I can see the trajectory. I've seen it before.

AI infrastructure gets commoditized within 18 months. Same way web hosting went from a business to a feature. AI DevOps gets automated by the same AI it manages.

AI safety becomes a checkbox inside the model, not a standalone company. AI consulting works until the client realizes Claude does what you do for $100 a month.

Every shiny AI opportunity right now is like opening a web design agency in 2005. Looks like the future for about a year and a half. Then it's a commodity.

I built a SaaS product. AI ate it. Not over years. Over months. The capabilities that made our tool valuable became a free feature inside the platforms our customers were already using.

We went from "this solves a real problem" to "why would anyone pay for this" in one product cycle.

I built a founder mobility practice around a specific system. The system collapsed — not because of AI, but because policy shifted and the entire model broke overnight. Years of expertise. Gone. Not deprecated. Cancelled.

Both times I was running from the discomfort of not knowing what was next. Both times I would have been better off waiting.

So this time I'm waiting.

The Conversation I Keep Having

A friend called me three weeks ago. Smart guy. Technical. He'd built a prototype for an AI-powered compliance tool. Had a deck. Had two potential customers interested in piloting.

Had that energy — the one where you can tell someone's been up until 2am every night for a month because they believe in the thing.

He wanted my honest take.

I told him: I think the tool works. I think the customers are real. And I think in 18 months, the LLM providers will offer this as a native feature, your two customers will churn, and you'll have burned a year of your life building something that became a checkbox.

He didn't want to hear it. I get it. When you've got momentum and the idea feels right, the last thing you want is someone telling you to slow down.

But I've been that guy. I've had the momentum. I've had the two customers. And I've watched the thing I built become worthless not because I executed poorly, but because the ground shifted under me faster than I could adjust.

I couldn't tell him to build. I'd be lying.

I also couldn't tell him with certainty that he was wrong. Maybe his timing is perfect. Maybe the LLM providers don't build the feature. Maybe those two customers become twenty.

That's the honest tension. I don't know. I just know what the pattern looks like. And the pattern says: not yet.

How It Feels

It feels terrible.

I need to be honest about that. Because the narrative version of "I'm strategically waiting" sounds wise. The lived version feels like watching a fire and choosing not to run.

Our entire culture equates action with progress. Especially when you're watching the world change in real time. Especially when the old revenue streams are dead and the new ones are early and unproven. Especially when everyone around you is launching things and raising money and performing momentum on Twitter.

I have a million dollars in cash and roughly 8 years of runway.

Most people can't afford to wait. I can. That's a privilege. And using that privilege means actually using it — not squandering it on the first thing that looks promising because the discomfort of doing nothing got too loud.

But some mornings I wake up and the voice is loud.

You're 27 and you're not building anything. Your friends are shipping products. Someone you know just raised a seed round for an AI tool that does something you could have built. W

hat if the window closes? What if you're the guy who was "strategically patient" while everyone else built the future?

I don't have a clean answer for that voice. Because it might be right.

That's the part that most "patience is a virtue" essays leave out. The possibility that you're wrong. That waiting IS the mistake. That the window closes while you're watching. That someone less thoughtful but more aggressive builds the thing and wins because they moved and you didn't.

I sit with that possibility every day. It doesn't resolve.

What I keep coming back to is: every time I built from discomfort instead of clarity, I lost. Every time. The SaaS product. The mobility practice. The urge to build was real both times. The clarity wasn't. And the gap between those two things cost me years.

So I'm betting on the same lesson a third time. Not because I'm certain. Because the downside of building wrong — 6-12 months and a chunk of capital burned on something that dies — is worse than the downside of waiting too long.

At least that's what I tell myself most mornings.

What I'm Actually Doing

I'm not passive. I want to be clear about that.

I'm tracking every signal about AI disruption. Reading the documents nobody reads — safety roadmaps, technical papers, government policy drafts. I'm writing daily about what I see.

Having real conversations with founders and displaced professionals going through this in real time.

I'm building a pattern. Which sectors get hit. How fast. What survives. What dies. How the gap between what AI can theoretically do and what actually changes on the ground behaves in practice.

Because that gap is the whole game.

AI can theoretically replace half of white-collar work. But Klarna tried to cut 40% of their workforce with AI. Quality collapsed. They rehired humans. At lower wages.

The technology is ahead of the implementation. That gap is real. It's closing. And the timing of when it closes — for which industry, in which geography, at what price point — determines everything about when to move and what to build.

I don't have that timing yet. Nobody does.

So I'm doing the thing that looks like nothing and feels like drowning but is actually preparation: watching, documenting, building judgment about a landscape that's changing faster than anyone can map it.

When the move becomes clear — not theoretically clear, actually clear, clear enough that I'd bet everything on it — I'll move fast. I have the cash, the time, and the positioning to move fast when the moment comes.

Until then, I'm standing still. On purpose.

The Price of Standing Still

One more honest thing.

Some of the people running right now are going to win. That's real. Some of those AI startups will work. Some of those "AI strategy" pivots will land. Someone I said no to will build something that succeeds, and I'll have to live with having watched it happen from the sideline.

That's the price of patience. Not a theoretical price. A real one.

But the price of impatience is worse. I know because I've paid it. Twice.

And the math on which price I'd rather pay — the regret of watching someone else win, or the cost of building the wrong thing at the wrong time — isn't close.

I'd rather be the person who waited too long than the person who built too early. Because waiting too long costs opportunity. Building too early costs time, money, credibility, and the energy you needed for the real move when it finally comes.

I don't know where to go yet.

I know where not to go.

For now, that's enough.