The Elevator Economy
Some people call this a K-shaped economy. I go further. We are in the elevator economy for the first time in human history. Self-improving AI is the dividing line. Some people are going up. Everyone else is going down. There is no standing still, and every month the elevator moves faster.
By the end of 2026, there will be billion-dollar businesses that are effectively self-running. No human in day-to-day operations. A founder with imagination and the right AI systems, generating more economic value than companies with thousands of employees did five years ago.
The people going up are not necessarily smarter or harder-working. They figured out that AI changes what is valuable. When a machine can execute, execution stops being scarce. What becomes scarce is the ability to imagine what should be built, and the trustworthiness to be given the keys to build it.
Why Execution Is No Longer the Moat
For decades, the economy rewarded execution speed. Who could ship fastest, grind hardest, scale the most efficient operation. That world made sense when execution was expensive and slow.
AI collapsed the cost of execution. Writing code, drafting documents, analyzing data, generating designs, researching markets. All approaching zero marginal cost. The things that used to take a team of ten and six months now take one person and a weekend.
The bottleneck has moved. It is no longer "can we build this?" It is "should we build this? What should it look like? Who is it for? What does it mean?"
Those are imagination questions. Imagination cannot be automated.
The Value Hierarchy
Where you sit on this hierarchy determines your value:
Level 0: Spectator. You watch the game. Information without application is entertainment.
Level 1: Player. You execute within existing systems, using AI to move faster. AI is compressing this level every quarter.
Level 2: Coach. You design the system that players operate within. Working on the business, not in it.
Level 3: Game Creator. You invent new games. Not better versions of existing businesses. New categories of value creation.
Level 4: Game Engine Creator. You build the engine that powers many games. Every game built on your engine creates value that flows back to you.
AI is compressing Levels 0 and 1 toward zero. This is liberating. The compression frees human energy for coaching, game creation, and engine building. The question is whether you are climbing.
Heartshare Over Mindshare
The attention economy is dying. In the imagination economy, the currency is trust. Not how many people know your name, but how many would hand you the keys to their business and sleep well that night. See heartshare for the full frame.
As the noise gets louder and synthetic content floods every channel, people will build with people they trust. Not the loudest voice. The person whose character they believe in.
How Industries Get Born
The sequence that creates new industries in the imagination economy:
- New technology enables new possibilities
- Someone with domain expertise and calling reimagines the industry from first principles
- Infrastructure gets built to support the new vision
- Businesses form on top of the infrastructure
- New roles emerge that did not exist before
- People get educated and activated into those roles
Every industry is about to be reinvented. Music, education, media, healthcare, finance. The people who thrive will be the ones imagining what the new roles look like and building toward them. For the full map of how different names for this economy relate, see The New Economy.
The Four Buckets
If you are not in one of these four buckets, what are you doing?
The Human Unicorn. The person who received a vision of what to create. A "little god" in the sub-creation sense: someone channeling a divine download into something real. Without this person, you are building slop. See Ensoul the Art.
The AGI Whisperer. The applied AI engineer who turns the unicorn's vision into an infinitely scalable product. Their output is a self-running business.
The Distribution Genius. The movement builder who gets the product into people's hands. Culture without distribution is useless.
The Glue. The person who holds the team together. Love, fun, harmony. A nice-to-have, but the teams that have it last longer and enjoy the ride more.
Every team that wins has at least the first three covered. The best operators play multiple roles. If any of these is missing, the whole thing breaks.
Human Capital Is Divine Capital
Notice what is not in the four buckets: technology by itself. AI can generate content all day. It cannot imagine what needs to exist. It cannot discern the difference between something the world needs and noise.
Humans are all that ever mattered in developing the economy, imagining the economy, growing the economy. Human capital is the only asset that matters.
Where This Is Happening
In my experience, Austin is where a disproportionate number of these configurations are being created right now. The imagination economy is clustering in places where trust is high, ego is low, and builders actually like each other.
If you want to see what the imagination economy looks like in practice, come to Austin.