6 Takeaways from Collective Future NYC

We recently hosted Collective Future in NYC and my head is still spinning (in a good way).

A few themes kept coming up across conversations with founders, operators, and investors:

AI is collapsing switching costs while raising the importance of brand, taste, distribution.

As models and infrastructure commoditize, defensibility increasingly comes from workflow integration, proprietary data, customer trust, and product judgment Anthropic’s “thinking caps” and human-centered branding may be as important as any feature set in the perception of it being the “best” AI for serious professionals.

ChatGPT hasn’t become the “App Store” many expected.

Founders mentioned that the apps currently live inside the ecosystem aren’t seeing the engagement or distribution needed to justify the investment. It sparked an interesting conversation around whether OpenAI will be able to rethink how discovery and visibility work for apps in their ecosystem.

Product-minded engineers are becoming disproportionately valuable.

One of my favorite comments from the day was around “judging engineers on taste, not just technical ability.” In the age of AI, technical chops are increasingly table stakes. The engineers who deeply understand users, workflows, design, and product intuition are becoming force multipliers.

Output and impact pricing > usage pricing.

We’re seeing more AI companies shift toward monetizing outcomes instead of seats or API calls. That change could have major implications for software margins, customer expectations, and how value accrues over time.

Another term that stuck with me: “Productivity Theater.”

There’s clearly pressure right now for everyone to demonstrate AI leverage and efficiency gains, but part of the conversation was whether some of those gains are more performative than substantive.

But more than anything, the event felt deeply optimistic.

At one point, Noah Glass, Founder of Olo, coined the term “Founder Pilled,” channeling his inner Morpheus. His point: nearly everyone in the room had chosen the founder pill: either building companies themselves or dedicating their careers to supporting builders.

That captured the energy of the day perfectly. No blind optimism, plenty of strong belief that we’re still incredibly early and that there’s never been a more exciting time to build.