How Do We Make Money?

And, what do we do with our time?

April 10, 2026

Delivered April 10, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Overcast & Balmy, 23⁰C / 73⁰ F.

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How do we make money and what do we do with our ti …

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital. I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s also a way for me to share principles of prosperity — because at the end of the day, venture is a pathway to prosperity.

Upcoming Event Alert

Investment Crowdfunding Week 2026 kicks off next week 🚀

Hosted by my friends at Kingscrowd, this year’s event is shaping up to deliver twice the impact of last year - and 2025 set a high bar.

If you’re curious about how innovative companies are building with their communities - and how you can get involved - I highly recommend signing up (it’s free).

I’ll also be co-moderating one of the pitch sessions on Tuesday @ 3:00pm ET. Hope to see you there!

How do we make money and what do we do with our time?

I have spent a lot of time thinking about AI and the future of venture. I think it’s going to radically reshape what it means to be an entrepreneur and what it means to be an investor. But underneath all of that, when I think about problems that need to be solved, I believe it comes down to two fundamental questions:

1) How do we make money?; and

2) What do we do with our time?

Here’s my thinking:

For most of modern history, those questions have been answered for us. We were placed into a system built around a simple loop: people work, people earn, and people consume. From an early age, we are trained into it - school as preparation for work, work as the mechanism for income, income as the fuel for consumption.

Over time, consumption became just as important as labor. Entire industries evolved to encourage it, shape it, and accelerate it. Access to easy credit made it possible to spend beyond immediate means, keeping the system expanding even as underlying conditions shifted. The result is an economy built not just on production, but on continuous consumption.

That system works as long as the loop holds.

AI begins to break that loop.

If a growing share of economically valuable work can be done by machines, then the link between labor and income weakens. Fewer people are required to produce the same output. Entire categories of work compress. And if that happens, a very simple question emerges that we don’t yet have a clear answer to:

Who is the consumer in a world where fewer people are required to work?

At the same time, something else is happening - something more subtle, but equally important.

When the requirement to work weakens, people do not automatically redirect their time toward meaningful or creative pursuits. In many cases, the opposite happens. Time shifts toward passive consumption and speculative activity. Watching instead of building. Betting instead of creating. Endless scrolling, day trading, sports betting, prediction markets - systems that offer stimulation and the promise of reward, but are largely disconnected from the creation of real value.

This is not a moral failure. It is a structural outcome. In the absence of direction, people gravitate toward what is easiest, most available, and most immediately rewarding.

Which means the real risk is not just economic disruption. It is drift. A world where human potential is not elevated, but diluted—spread across distraction and speculation.

But this is not the only path.

If AI reduces the need for human execution, it also changes where human value sits. The constraint is no longer the ability to do the work. It is the ability to decide what work is worth doing.

That is where entrepreneurship comes in.

Not entrepreneurship as it has traditionally been framed—building large organizations, raising capital, scaling headcount - but something more fundamental. The act of seeing something about the world that others do not, and organizing resources to bring a solution into existence.

In that sense, entrepreneurship is not going away. It becomes more important.

If execution becomes abundant, then advantage shifts to judgment, to understanding human behavior, to earning trust, to building distribution, and to creating things that people actually care about.

AI, in this context, is not the enemy. It is leverage. It allows individuals and small teams to execute at a level that previously required entire organizations. It lowers the cost of experimentation. It makes it possible to move from idea to reality faster than ever before.

Which means the path forward is not to resist the shift, but to invent within it.

And this is not something that will be solved by Silicon Valley alone. It is not Wall Street’s job to figure out. It is not Washington’s job to define for us.

It is ours.

We are going to have to become owners, not just participants. Capital allocators, not just consumers and watchers. We will need to support and empower the small percentage of people who can see what comes next - those with the vision and courage to build new systems, but who need capital, trust, and collective backing to bridge from the current reality to a new one.

This is not just about making money.

It is about building a new model for how we live, how we create, and how we participate in the world.