Software is going to zero

Delivered March 6, 2026 @ 5:00pm ET

Weather in Bloomington, IN - Not a cloud in the sky, 18⁰ C / 64⁰ F

Table of Contents

• Software is Going to Zero

• The Cost Curve Is Collapsing

• The Gatekeeper Era Is Over

• Enter the Venture Discoverer

• What a Venture Discoverer Does

• The Vision

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.

Software is Going to Zero

In 2013, Marc Andreessen laid out a thesis that "Software will eat the world."

He was right.

Over the past decade, trillions of dollars of wealth were created by companies that built software to create entirely new industries and streamline existing ones. Billions of venture dollars poured into this movement, and it proved extremely lucrative.

Software also created something investors love: stickiness and defensible moats. If a company built the software, competitors simply couldn't recreate it easily. Years of engineering work, proprietary codebases, millions in accumulated technical debt that kept the drawbridge up — that was the game. Build it, own it, defend it.

But today, something new is happening.

AI — and increasingly agentic AI — is beginning to eat software itself. Having spent 600 hours working with agentic coding, there is no doubt in my mind that we are on the precipice of a major tectonic shift in venture.

The Cost Curve Is Collapsing

Think about what it took to build a SaaS (Software as a Service) product five years ago. You needed a founding team with at least one strong engineer, probably two or three. You needed months to build an MVP. You needed runway — usually $500K to $1M just to get to something shippable.

That was the entry fee.

Today, that fee is evaporating.

A solo founder with a clear vision can now do in a weekend what used to take a team a quarter. AI tools are generating production-quality code, writing tests, debugging errors, and architecting entire systems — in real time, on demand. Agentic frameworks are going further: planning features, writing them, testing them, and deploying them with minimal human intervention.

This isn't theoretical. Founders are already shipping:

• Full-stack web apps built in days by a single person handling product, design, and code simultaneously.

• Internal tools that used to require a dedicated engineering hire, now spun up by operations teams with no coding background.

• Niche SaaS products targeting specific industries — legal, healthcare, logistics — built by domain experts who finally have the tools to match their knowledge.

The pattern is the same everywhere: people who deeply understand a problem are no longer blocked by their inability to build the solution.

When the cost of software approaches zero — and the number of people needed to run a company drops dramatically — something inevitable happens:

Entrepreneurship explodes.

The Gatekeeper Era Is Over

For decades, Silicon Valley acted as the gatekeeper to the entrepreneurial economy. You needed to be in the room. You needed the network, the warm intro, the Sand Hill Road meeting. Capital was concentrated. Talent was concentrated. The tools to build were expensive and required years of training.

That geography created a filter. Most of the world's best ideas — and most of the world's best founders — never made it through.

Some people in the technology industry are trying to slow this narrative down. They say the change is exaggerated, or that it will take decades. Denying this reality is as naïve as believing viruses cannot cross geographic borders.

Reality moves faster than expectations.

The next great company might be built by a nurse in Nashville who understands healthcare workflows better than any Stanford CS grad. A logistics operator in Indianapolis who has watched the same inefficiency play out for twenty years and finally has the tools to fix it. A teacher in rural Texas who sees exactly what students need and can now build it herself.

These are not hypothetical profiles. They are the next wave. They always were — they just lacked the tools.

And when startups explode, opportunity explodes with them.

Enter the Venture Discoverer

Here's what most people are missing in this conversation: the opportunity isn't just for founders.

It's for the people around them.

The old venture model required institutions. Sand Hill Road existed because discovering and funding great founders demanded proximity, pattern recognition built over decades, and enough capital to absorb the inevitable failures. The process was centralized by necessity.

But what if discovery itself is about to be decentralized?

Think about who actually has early access to the next generation of great founders — before the institutions do. It's not the partners at Sequoia. It's the people who share a hometown, a diaspora, an alumni network, or a community with those founders.

The Nigerian community in London. The Indian alumni network of a mid-tier state university. The former colleagues of someone who just left a corporate job to build. The Discord moderator of a niche professional community where a founder is solving a problem no one else has noticed yet.

These people have something no institutional investor can buy: trusted proximity.

That's the foundation of a new kind of investor — the Venture Discoverer.

What a Venture Discoverer Does

A Venture Discoverer isn't just an angel investor with a smaller check. The model is fundamentally different.

Traditional venture is about pattern-matching against proven signals: the Stanford pedigree, the prior exit, the hot market. Venture Discoverers operate on a different signal entirely — deep community knowledge. They know which people in their network are brilliant, hungry, and underestimated. They've watched them operate for years. They understand their domain, their work ethic, their character.

And beyond capital, they bring two things that matter enormously at the earliest stage:

Belief. The first investor in any founder's journey doesn't just provide money — they provide social proof. They say publicly: I've seen this person, and I'm betting on them. In communities where that kind of validation has historically been hard to find, it's transformative.

Distribution. A Venture Discoverer embedded in a diaspora, an alumni network, or a professional community has organic reach to exactly the people a founder needs most: early customers, early hires, early advocates. That's not a small thing. That's often the difference between a startup that gains traction and one that doesn't.

The best Venture Discoverers won't be competing with institutional VCs for the same deals. They'll be finding founders that institutional VCs will never see — until it's too late to get in early.

The Vision

Imagine a world where every major diaspora has its own network of Venture Discoverers actively backing founders from within it. Where every mid-sized city has a community of locals who invest in the builders among them. Where alumni networks don't just facilitate job placements but seed the next generation of companies.

This isn't charity. It isn't altruism dressed up as investing. It's a genuine edge.

The founders coming out of these communities are building for markets they understand intimately. They have distribution channels that feel organic because they are organic. And they're being discovered before the competition arrives.

Silicon Valley didn't build its dominance through geography alone. It built it through density of trust — people who knew each other, believed in each other, and backed each other early.

That density of trust exists everywhere. It always has.

For the first time, the tools exist to turn it into a venture strategy.

The next wave of entrepreneurship may come from anywhere. The people who recognize that first — and act on it — won't just witness the shift.

They'll own a piece of it.

— Gerry