How to Build a Business Today: What Has Changed

How do you start your own business today, when artificial intelligence is reshaping entire markets and the rules of success are available to everyone? In this conversation with Dmitry Mugenov I look at why access to knowledge about business has not made people's decisions any better.

Why does the phrase "artificial intelligence will help us" give you nothing on its own, if millions of people use the same tool? Is manual work protected, if with AI you can find the part yourself and fix a leak without a service company? And where should you start: with choosing a niche, or with the question of what you need a business for?

How to start a business in the new reality

A huge number of people, trying to earn money with their businesses, spend nothing but money for years.

I was driving and thinking about how a person should start their own business in the current times. We film a lot about choosing a profession. But how would I approach starting a business now?

Over the last twenty years we have gone through an incredible number of transformations and changes, including in how people approach business. Originally, at least at our age, the mind was set up so that you opened whatever business someone nearby had told you about, or some idea someone had brought: "I wanted to open this thing next to you."

More knowledge. What changes in decisions?

Then all sorts of training programmes and coaching started to appear. There was huge access to descriptions of what business looks like in other countries, in different approaches, among interesting people. People started telling the stories of cool, famous corporations, and a very strong emphasis came to be placed on that.

For the last ten years, at least in the Russian-speaking space, we have watched a strong era of growth. You have crazy access to what kind of business you could open. Simply incredible access. That used to be impossible.

I remember how in 2001 my friends and I decided to trade phones. It was so poorly thought through, so pointless: we went to Poland by bus to buy phones. It's hard to imagine how pointless it was.

And it seems that now everyone is incredibly ready to launch a very clear-cut business. As if it has become clear how to open a business and how to build one. And yet we can observe a pattern. I have a fairly wide circle of acquaintances, a huge number of people are constantly interested in various topics, and on top of that, because there are many YouTube channels, people keep sending me business ideas — especially ones connected with technology or artificial intelligence.

And you know what's interesting? People propose ideas involving technology or artificial intelligence just as clumsily as they would have fifteen years ago. They are not really any different. People come in thinking they have a brilliant idea or a brilliant product, that they are making an incredibly significant thing. And they are so inspired by it that they forget to look at the reality that is actually happening. It feels as if they are not looking the truth in the eye.

I see this around me a great deal, an insane amount: among people close to me and among people I have never seen in my life. Today, as we were driving to San Francisco to see Max, I was saying that in four years in America, living in Silicon Valley, I have almost never come across people who reasoned well about what kind of business they were building. Of course I come across people who launch serious startups and raise a lot of money, but that is a somewhat different market. And this has nothing to do with whether people come from that market or have experience in it. I know a huge number of people who have experience and want to build yet another piece of nonsense. From the very beginning it looks like a losing option: it is as if they want to get into a losing story.

Where is my argument going? First of all to this: essentially, almost nothing has changed.

Compare it with the time when there was no access to descriptions of how to open your own business, of the technology, of the competitive environment, of the steps to success, of how people with the right approaches do it. Now we can endlessly read the fifteen most important rules of success from people who made their money after fifty. The forty main rules of success from people who earned a billion dollars in their lifetime. Simply a catastrophic number of rules, written down everywhere and talked about everywhere. And yet every day people keep acting exactly as they did when those rules did not exist.

AI and competition

And now the problem has become even sharper. We have arrived at a time when artificial intelligence technologies are all around us, and they have radically changed the whole space and all the possibilities.

By the way, Dima, notice this: when a person says "look, artificial intelligence will help us now," they have lost from the start, because millions of people around the world are doing exactly the same thing.

Millions, and in fact tens of millions, of people around the world use artificial intelligence in their work in no way worse than any given person does. And a person will tell you that they have started using artificial intelligence in their life, that they have no employees, that they do nothing without artificial intelligence, or that they have eighty-six agents working for them every day.

It's actually funny to hear people describe how a huge number of agents work for them. The question is: why did you set up eighty-six agents, if you could have solved all eighty-six questions in a single session, very often automatically? People have got to the point of parallelising tasks between agents, and with today's artificial intelligence there is no need for that at all. What's more, systems like Claude Code or ChatGPT, OpenAI, are built precisely so that you do everything from one space and interact with one infrastructure, and it makes no difference how many agents you have.

So what should a person do if they still want to launch some business, to do something of their own? What should they do today? Go and open a shop, a coffee shop, or yet another company developing websites or software, of which there are a billion in the world? It's unclear how that will develop and who will need it. Because today, due to artificial intelligence, a huge number of markets are incredibly disrupted. On the one hand, help seems to have arrived; on the other, insane chaos has set in.

Remember: three years ago, when the technology really took off, with ChatGPT 3.5, a lot of people argued that the only professions that would remain and that are one hundred percent protected are plumber or electrician, that is, manual professions. But if we look at the facts and ask whether the profession of plumber or electrician is protected, we see an incredibly important point: with systems like ChatGPT and Claude Code around, plumbers and electricians will take a far more serious hit than professions that had already been automated and capitalised. I don't know whether you follow my thought.

– Yes, I follow your thought. I know a specific person: last week he told me that he managed to get a job as an electrician without understanding anything about it, with ChatGPT. And he handled those tasks quite successfully, if that's what you mean.

I mean an even more serious story. You have just said, absolutely correctly, that people who want to work and are able to work now have access to an incredible choice of different professions. I live in Silicon Valley now, and with the help of ChatGPT I can train as an electrician much faster, get a licence much more easily than before, and get a job as an electrician. And if I have ChatGPT and another electrician doesn't, I will be far more competitive. I will find problems and solve tasks faster, I will be more efficient in terms of costs, allocating my time and selling my time, especially if I work as a sole trader.

But I, Dima, am talking about a much more serious disruption of the market. The market is a very important topic when we talk about business. The market of plumbers and electricians was essentially without technology. It is manual work: a person comes and solves things by hand. As my mother's wife, who manages buildings and properties in Minsk, says, you are directly dependent on the plumber, you have no options. Only he knows how to solve the problem, and he is the only one. Often there simply are no other people.

And now look at what has appeared. Two weeks ago my toilet started leaking: I got a notification that something in the house was leaking. I asked ChatGPT what in a house could be using a hundred or a hundred and fifty litres an hour, which is exactly what we had. It told me: a single toilet easily could. I walked around and saw that one of the toilets was leaking.

Usually I tell my wife about it straight away, and she writes to the service person who resolves such issues instantly. I can't say I know much about it, and I have always said: if there are questions, write to the person. It is included in the service.

And I thought: since a hundred, a hundred and fifty or two hundred litres of water an hour are pouring out, it probably makes sense to spend five minutes and try to solve the problem myself. By the time everyone arrives, so much money will have leaked away — and it's not certain they will come, or that they will fix it right away. Opening the lid, I could see with the naked eye that a particular part in the toilet was broken. Without ChatGPT I would hardly have taken this on: I would have had to work out which part to buy and how to find it, then figure out how to install it and read the instructions. But now this is solved instantly.

I photographed the inside of the toilet — four photos — and it gave me a link on Amazon to the part I needed to buy. I bought it. When it arrived, it told me in a second how to replace it, and I replaced it.

So what actually happened? I completely removed the chain in which I contact the service company, and the service company, under its warranty, calls out a plumber.

The plumber charges two hundred dollars an hour or three hundred dollars for a call-out. On the first day he can't fix it, the parts need to be ordered, he drives to the shop and charges more money. I don't know what that job would have cost — say, five hundred dollars. I did spend some time, but I would have spent it anyway, because I live in this house and water was leaking. They would still have had to drive out to me. And Amazon delivered everything to my door.

My example seems very simple and silly. But what matters is that the world has changed, and what that will affect. No one thought plumbers would be affected: everyone always said it was protected work. That was one of the fundamental beliefs. But now we can see that it is not protected at all. This market is old, it is hard to enter, and it will be transformed very harshly. And there are a great many offline markets like that.

Someone will say: "Sasha, you've told an easy story. If you have a leak in the door, you'll still have to call a crew." Maybe. And maybe not. If a person wants to save two or three thousand dollars — and in some country that kind of job might cost three hundred dollars — they will do it themselves with the help of their phone or their system. Before, they would not even have understood how to approach it, and now they can.

First the goal, then the niche

And so we come to business. What should you do in business, then? I led up to this in our discussion for a reason. What we have here is more of a line of reasoning in the form of an essay, not ten points prepared in advance on how to open a business. Because there is no universal truth: each person has their own approach to which business to launch now.

Once again, Dima: every day I keep seeing people make insane mistakes in choosing niches. There is artificial intelligence, it would seem, and yet people still don't check who their competitors are, don't open their eyes, and don't read on the internet whether it's possible to make money on this at all. They still can't calculate their P&L or cash flow, that is, they don't keep financial statements. They still track ordinary operating metrics incorrectly. Very often they keep acting on intuition, making the decisions they want to make rather than the ones that match reality. They keep believing untrue information.

We live in a world where far more people have started to lie. If you look at the facts, far more people have started to deceive. Now deception seems much easier to check, but we still live in a world where people don't really want to check each other.

Usually in business, when a person is thinking about it and wants to open a business, they start reasoning about which niche to choose. Maybe this still comes from the days of Business Molodost, when the fundamental first step was choosing a niche. I think this will be an interesting topic for you in terms of your own perception.

– What do you think, is it right now to start with choosing a niche, or with something else?

– Definitely not with choosing a niche.

– And why definitely not with a niche?

– The very skill of choosing a niche, probably. Or rather, some kind of approach in general.

– But again, you're talking about choosing a niche.

– Not about choosing a niche, but about the approach in general. You said that one of the tasks is to figure out who you are in the new reality. First, before choosing what to do, understand: who am I? What suits me, what is realistic and unrealistic, achievable and unachievable for me personally — in the country where I live, in that place, at this time? What universal actions are there? And only then move on to which niche is now available. Maybe I'm overcomplicating it a bit, but it feels like you need to go from the inside out.

Look, choosing a niche from the very start is a relatively sound strategy, and people really do, Dima, start by saying that they need to choose a niche. But of course it's worth looking at your life: where are you? Do you need to launch a business right now or not? Is this the right time for you to build a business? And if the time is right, what do you want to do it for?

Perhaps ten years ago the right decision would have been the same. It's hard for me to go back now from my current awareness. But I would certainly ask the question: what do you want to build a business for? Why do you need it?

Goals and responsibility

About three months ago I came home to Polina, my wife, and said: "Polina, listen, would you like to open some kind of shop in our town, where we live?" She said: "Well, yes, I would. Why do you ask?" An interesting point: I caught a certain energy and a feeling that it would be interesting for our family to have a particular business in town that my wife would find interesting.

After that the idea dissolved very quickly. Having asked my wife a few questions at home and discussed with her the very notion of this shop, we saw that a person would have to take on the responsibility, and it would have to be my wife, not me. I'm not sure that full responsibility for opening this business interested me. In this case it was an antiques shop.

Why did I come up with this idea? I came up with it based on what my goal was.

It is always the question: first the goal was born in me, and then I fitted the business idea to it.

I had a feeling that for better, really good contact in the town where I live — and it's a small, fairly closed, isolated town — it would be great to open a shop in order to connect with the local audience. Especially if you have an interesting range of goods. I wasn't suggesting opening a shop that sells underwear or children's goods. I saw that one could sell a certain type of antiques — not only furniture or objects, but possibly also things that have a story. Even new ones, but with a fairly big, strong story.

The idea appealed to me because it would strengthen local interaction. You could even call it local influence. And I thought this arrangement could be combined with my wife's interests.

But after discussing it with my wife, we saw that she would have a completely different goal in this business. Local influence would not interest her. What would interest her is, for example, the very fact of having her own shop, or a certain kind of work, or earning money, or social contact with people. And note that her social contact with people would be somewhat different from mine. It would differ from mine. Our goals did not match, and it is by the goal that you can look further at the business.

Why did my wife abandon the idea so quickly? In fact, it was I who abandoned it very quickly. I blocked it, and quite firmly. I said: "I'm not even going to discuss this goal with you any more." Her friend Tanya was there too, and she said: "Oh, listen, that's great, Polina, it would suit you." It would have been great for the friend too if Polina had a shop she could come to.

But I saw that they would like the shop simply to exist and to fulfil all their wishes there. And the responsibility for the shop — for investing money in it, for the financial accounting, for whether it generates a loss or a profit, and if a loss, where it's covered from; for problems and arrangements in town, for licences, taxes, reporting, for the sewage, the electricity and anything else — would be carried by someone else, for example the husband.

In my arrangement it was like this: I would help open it strategically on some issues, but I would not deal with those matters. I was ready to set aside a certain amount of money for it. But that amount of money had to be very strictly focused, limited and very thoroughly discussed.

What do we arrive at? From the very beginning there was a goal. Then, behind the goal or next to it, there were certain principles. My goal was to open a shop that strengthens connections, and for that goal it matters a great deal what range of goods it has and where it is located.

Someone will ask: "And how much money will it generate?" I'll say: "Maybe none at all. Or maybe it will generate a loss." — "What do you mean, a loss?" — "I don't mind if it generates, say, ten thousand dollars of loss a month. I'm ready to pay that for connections, or for having an office in an antiques shop." Why not? Why shouldn't I have a shop that I open when I want and can close? It can be closed all the time, like a lot of shops in our Los Altos: you drive up and they are simply closed. Or it can work at weekends, or from eleven to three. You have the right to do what you want in it. That is your right as a business owner.

Your own business or a job?

And here is what I, Dima, truly recommend to everyone. At the very beginning you said, and you're right about something: "Who are you in the current time?" But I want to say that this is not the question. The answer to who you are in the current time automatically limits you, increases your fear or your ego. At any time you remain a human being. At any time you have the opportunity to think quite broadly and act quite broadly.

At any time, as a human being, you have a choice of how to live. You have the opportunity to live very poorly, or somewhere in the middle; you have the opportunity to work a little or to work a lot. Many people may throw stones at me and say they don't have that opportunity, that they have children or something else. It's all your choice.

It's true that in different countries and different families there are different conditions you find yourself in, and the range of options may be limited. There are places on Earth where it is minus thirty outside all the time, or plus thirty-five, and you can't do certain things. You seem to be limited in your choice, but on the whole you have options.

I know a great many people who say they have little money or that they can't find a job. And you say: "Why don't you get a job as a taxi driver and earn money? Why don't you go and work in a coffee shop and earn a few thousand dollars extra? There are vacancies right there." I am not belittling taxi drivers here. It is these people who belittle the level: they want to find a job strictly in a particular profession, and meanwhile years go by. There are people who can't find work for years. Yet over a few years as a taxi driver you can earn very decent money. There are plenty of jobs where you can earn money.

A huge number of people, trying to earn money with their businesses, spend nothing but money for years.

At the start they invest some sum in opening a shop, a coffee shop, a clothing store or an online store. They spend an endless amount of money, when they could simply go and earn it.

I have a friend who runs a health salon. I tell her: "Listen, you earn as little as if you worked two or three times less and simply for someone else, doing practically the same work. The difference would be that the business belongs to someone else, not to you. And you wouldn't have the responsibility." But for that you have to come to terms with your ego as well. Society would have to accept it. You have to be very calm about it.

Today you said something interesting. I was talking about launching new training programmes and showed you the platform I'm building, and you said that a person would be able to build an individual path and ask: "I'm in such-and-such a situation. How can I earn so much money? I like such-and-such a niche in such-and-such a place." And I said it won't work like that.

Why? Because when I say that a person can set themselves a goal and principles, I state them in relation to the situation in which I feel I can do it. For example, I feel that my wife won't be able to open this shop on her own right now. I don't just feel it, I have a deep certainty. And you may well agree with me on this: she would not be able to launch it without traumatising my psyche.

She could launch it without traumatising my psyche by asking my friends and various acquaintances: she has a huge number of contacts with people who could help her. But she wouldn't do it that way. In all likelihood she would traumatise my psyche. So she won't even start, and there is no need to spend effort discussing such a business with her.

That's why I told her straight away: "There's one circumstance: to do this, you'll have to deal with these kinds of issues yourself." She very quickly ran out of the room. Someone may say: "Sasha, you didn't help her. You suggested something and didn't give the person a hand." But I think I did give her a hand precisely by seeing the truth as quickly as possible.

I didn't slide into a lie so that together we would spend several hundred thousand dollars, get a huge number of problems and still not accomplish the main task. My wife would have been under stress rather than enjoying the business. I would have been under stress too and would not have got any end result.

If there are two partners in a business, it is critically important that you share one common central goal. Let each of you have your own personal goals as well, but the central goal must overlap between you.

For example, you both have to want to earn money together. For my wife, earning five thousand dollars a month for a certain level of work would be great. But for me, earning five thousand dollars in a business for the level of work I could put in here is not interesting at all. I would say: "No, I won't do it." Because she and I have different approaches and different opportunities to earn money. And I understand that perfectly well.

A choice for years ahead

In modern times there is the following problem. Once you have worked out where you are and felt your goal, the next question arises: what should you actually do, given the competition that exists in the market? Especially if you are entering a niche where not everything is clear.

There are niches that are more or less clear. For example, renting or the cost of housing. It is a more or less stable market, and that is exactly why you won't earn much money in it. You can save there, put money aside, get something by chance. But on the whole you won't earn. It is more profitable to buy S&P 500 shares.

Now we have also arrived at a situation where many people, where they live, have the opportunity to go and work with their hands or give their time, and often earn more money than they would from some separate business.

In recent years I have suggested to a great many people that they not open a business, so as not to lose money. Look, Dima, not even time, but money specifically. Many people have certain savings, and on the basis of them they want to get into something. Did everyone give up? Not at all. Many wanted to open a business, opened it, and lost a fairly large amount of money.

Often there were also people nearby who helped them lose that money. They joined in, said they believed in their idea, or became partners without putting in money — and helped them lose money. Or they joined with money and lost it too. Or for one side of the partnership it was an easy story, and for the other it was a substantial loss.

An important principle in business today is to look strategically ahead in time. Before launching a business today, I would very strongly recommend asking yourself: why do you want to do this or that thing?

Today, Dima, Max and I were walking in San Francisco and talking about how as a child I decided to trade phones. It ended very quickly, after a month or two. Or how I went to a job interview — I wanted to get a job as a merchandiser at Pepsi-Cola, because I simply needed urgent money. With Max we discussed examples of famous people who had the opportunity not to think about how to earn their first hundred, five hundred or thousand dollars a month. When a person has the opportunity not to think about that, they have the opportunity to make a broader, more correct choice and to make it strategically.

One of the most important things, when I talk about strategy ahead, is to see your time a little ahead and to understand a little better how strategically important and right it is to do this for the future. Will what you are doing now really be useful to you and work in your favour? Or will it set off a trajectory in which you lose money, time, or a relationship with someone?

After all, there are a huge number of stories where people lose relationships. When Andrey Rogachev and I were building the Agro24 business together, you could call it experience, an interesting project in terms of the market and technology — and at the same time we lost our relationship. Is it possible, by not doing a business, to keep certain relationships, to stay in them? Can you get a negative or a positive effect from that?

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