Why Faster Horses?

Most software today is a faster horse.

For the past decade, an entire generation of product leaders were rewarded for optimizing existing systems.

We ran experiments and refined onboarding flows. We increased activation by 4% and decreased churn by 0.6%. We copied what worked and scaled it up. We got very good at improving what already existed. But whatt we gradually stopped doing is questioning the form itself.

That’s part of why so much SaaS feels interchangeable. The UI differs, but the workflows are comparable. The philosophy behind the software – if it exists – seems to be identical from one competitor to the other. This optimization culture, despite being framed as experimental, created conservative builders.

AI is beginning to expose that weakness.

For years, differentiation has lived in the interface – your onboarding flows, app polish, convenience. But agents don’t care about onboarding flows. They don’t read your popups. They don’t admire your well-designed checkout flows.

They call APIs.

When agents handle the interaction work for their humans, the interface stops being much of an advantage. Capability, reliability, composability, price & value matter more.

Signals are pointing to a shift in the market from interface experiences to pure capability. This shift won’t happen overnight, but it does change the direction we’re traveling in.

So where are we going wrong?

In late 2025 I moved from leading the Comms & Creative team to AI Operations. I thought the core work would be about productivity and adoption. But it’s turned into a different, deeper question: are we thinking in fundamentally different ways, or just applying AI as another feature layer and point solution?

Put another way: How willing are we to give up the things that we’ve built – the software, the assumptions about the way the world works – to make ourselves ready for an AI future?

The danger now isn’t building bad software or failing on a conviction play. The danger is in perfecting the horse while the engine is being invented.

Faster Horses is about figuring out which one we’re building.