The startup I would have killed for in 2020
Running a venture in 2026 is nothing like 2020. Except for the one thing that never changes.
Issue #03 · May 17th 2026
I write about the things that don’t change in a world that won’t stop changing.
I believe adding real value is what gives us purpose, keeps us happy and improves our lives.
A few months ago I was building a tool for MOVEN. Nothing dramatic, a venture scoring system to evaluate business ideas against a structured set of dimensions. The kind of internal tool that, in a previous life, would have sat on a backlog for six weeks before anyone touched it.
I opened Claude Code. I described what I needed in plain English. I iterated a few times. I deployed to production.
The whole thing took an afternoon.
I got goosebumps.
Not because the tool was impressive. Because of what it meant. In my head, involuntarily, I started doing the calculation. NEXMO. MOVEN. Eccocar. Intel. The mental comparison ran itself before I could stop it. And what it produced wasn’t satisfaction. It was something closer to vertigo.
We thought we were fast. We had no idea.
What 2020 actually looked like
Let me describe what building an equivalent tool at Eccocar in 2020 would have required.
First, someone would have written a brief. Then a Product Owner would have refined it into user stories. A Scrum Master would have facilitated the sprint planning. A Team Lead would have estimated the effort. A backend engineer would have built the API. A full-stack engineer would have built the interface. A UX designer would have made sure it didn’t look like it was built in a basement. Everyone would have attended the daily standups, the sprint review, the retrospective. There would have been a staging environment, a QA cycle, a deployment checklist.
Six people. Six weeks. One internal tool.
And we were considered a fast organisation. We were proud of our velocity. We shipped features that enterprise clients at Amadeus actually used. We thought we were operating at startup speed.
Sitting there with my laptop, having just deployed a production-ready tool in an afternoon (in English, not even in code), I realised that what we called fast in 2020 was the stone age. Genuinely. The comparison isn’t cruel. It’s just accurate.
The two fronts that drained everything
Here is the thing about building a software startup in 2020 that nobody fully prepared me for: you were fighting two completely different wars simultaneously.
Front one: technical development. You needed to hire engineers before you could build anything. Engineers were expensive, scarce, and opinionated. You needed a CTO whose timeline estimates were, charitably, optimistic. You needed a process: sprints, standups, retrospectives… because without it, six people working on the same codebase produced chaos. The MVP cost money before it produced anything. Which meant you needed funding before you had proof.
Front two: market validation. While the technical front consumed most of your attention and almost all of your cash, you were supposed to be simultaneously validating that anyone would actually pay for what you were building. This required customer conversations, pilots, proposals, and the particular kind of psychological resilience required to keep selling something that doesn’t fully exist yet.
Most founders, and of course I include myself, were never trained for both fronts at once. We were good engineers, or good commercial thinkers, or good operators. The ones who could hold all three simultaneously were extraordinarily rare, and they burned out faster than anyone else.
The result was a startup ecosystem where an enormous amount of energy, money, and human talent was consumed before a single customer received a single euro of value. Seed rounds existed to fund the gap between idea and first paying customer. That gap was expensive because building was expensive. Investors were, in a very real sense, paying for the cost of execution, not the value of the idea.
You spent months fighting the clock, draining your runway, making the pitch deck more polished, hiring carefully, managing the sprint velocity, hoping that when the MVP finally shipped, the market would validate your assumptions. Most of the time it didn’t, at least not in the form you expected. Then you iterated. More runway. More runway. More runway.
Extremely draining. And the startup had still not shown any value whatsoever.
What changed
The software development effort is now, for most purposes, gone.
That sentence deserves to sit on its own.
Not reduced. Not improved. For a solo founder building a software product in 2026, the execution layer has been compressed to the point where it is no longer the binding constraint. You can describe what you need in plain language, iterate in real time, and deploy to production in hours. You need a domain, a GitHub account, and enough technical literacy to understand what you’re asking the system to build. That’s it.
The implications cascade immediately.
No seed funding required to reach MVP. No hiring required before you can build. No sprint planning, no standups, no retrospectives. No runway anxiety during the build phase. No gap between idea and first customer conversation, because you can have a working prototype before the conversation ends.
Time to first value: hours, not months. Cash required to reach MVP: near zero. Team size required: one person who understands the problem.
And here is the part that still makes me stop when I think about it: the solopreneur who ships a tool tomorrow that solves a real problem for a paying customer overnight has built something more valuable than the team of four that raised €300,000 for an MVP in 2020 and spent eight months building it. Same value delivered. Fraction of the effort, the cost, the time. You can even sell it on TrustMRR and make an exit without ever having a team.
The definition of a startup needs updating. The person with a clear idea, a paying customer, and an afternoon is a founder. Full stop.
What didn’t change
And here is the invariant, the thing that 2026 didn’t touch at all.
You still have to understand what someone will actually pay for.
The tools are extraordinary. The speed is real. The cost compression is permanent. But none of it matters if you don’t know what problem you’re solving, for whom, and why they would choose your solution over doing nothing.
The grey matter shift (which I wrote about in the last issue), accelerates in this environment rather than reverting. When execution is free, judgment is everything. The founder who wins in 2026 is not the one who can prompt the best. It’s the one who understands the customer’s business well enough to know what to build before a single line of code is written.
The two fronts collapsed into one. The technical front is mostly solved. What remains is the market front, the understanding, the translation, the judgment. And that front was always the harder one. We just used to be able to hide behind the technical front when it got uncomfortable.
A word on moving atoms
There is an important exception to everything above: startups that move atoms.
Manufacturing, hardware, physical infrastructure, robotics: these still require capital, time, and teams. You cannot deploy a factory with Claude Code. The compression I’ve described is specific to software, and software specifically.
But even here, the tools are changing the internal velocity of complex organisations. AI-assisted development is compressing the software layer of hardware companies — the control systems, the interfaces, the data pipelines. The ventures being built at the intersection of physical industry and software intelligence — where the challenge is applying AI reasoning to decades of manufacturing process — benefit asymmetrically from these tools even if they can’t eliminate the physical constraints entirely.
The atom-movers still need time, capital, and teams. But their software engineers are now dramatically more productive than they were in 2020. The gap between software ventures and hardware ventures is narrowing, even if it hasn’t closed.
The utopia at the end of the road
There’s a version of this story that ends somewhere extraordinary.
If tools keep getting better and cheaper, and there is no structural reason they won’t, then the cost of solving a software problem approaches zero. Every person with judgment and a customer problem can build the solution themselves. Value creation gets democratised in a way that no previous technology enabled.
Elon talks about this. Universal Basic Income, energy from the sun, AI and robotics solving the physical constraints. A world where the economy of abundance frees humans from the necessity of work.
It’s a compelling vision. I just have one question for the people building toward it.
If we are no longer defined by what we do professionally — if the work identity that most of us have built our entire sense of self around dissolves into abundance — what exactly are we going to do with all that time?
If the last few years of social media are any evidence, the answer involves a lot of very confident opinions, a great deal of outrage, and an X account.
Maybe the real scarce resource, in every era, is the same thing it has always been: the wisdom to know what actually matters.
Only value holds.
Fernando Martín is Managing Director of NEXMO Movement Data Hub (UC3M), Venture Builder at MOVEN, and founder of Eccocar. He writes here about venture building, AI agent operations, and the European technology landscape.
The Invariance — by Fernando Martín In a constantly evolving world, only value is the invariance that holds everything together.
Thanks for reading. If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to read it.