This Is the First Founder Class That Doesn't Need a Backlog

Someone asked me last week what the incoming Techstars class is going to look like. I told them: probably the first class in 20 years where the founder's first hire isn't an engineer. They laughed. I wasn't joking.

Here's what I believe is happening. For 20 years, starting a company meant the same first move, every time. You had an idea, and you needed someone who could translate that idea into code. Until you found that person, your idea just sat there. That was true in 2006, when we ran our first program. It was true last year. It stopped being true sometime in the last 12 months, and few have updated their mental model yet.

This week, 100 founders walked into our Global Kickoff in Boston. Some of them are going to skip that first move entirely.

I know how this sounds. We've heard the "citizen developer" pitch before, and it never delivered. Low-code tools failed because they asked people to become bad programmers, dragging boxes around a canvas that could never say what they actually meant. AI changes the interface completely. You describe what you want in the language you already speak, and you get back working software. Not a mockup. Not a requirements doc that gets mangled through three layers of tickets. A real, working version.

Look at who's furthest ahead on this. At Anthropic, somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of new production code is written by AI. Their legal, finance, and marketing teams use the same tools their engineers use. The frontier labs are a preview of what every company looks like soon, and the wall between "technical" and "non-technical" is already coming down.

So what happens to engineering? It doesn't disappear. It concentrates. A founder who once needed a whole department to get to launch now needs a few sharp engineers, and those few have more leverage than a department ever did, because the job looks nothing like it used to. They're not implementing every feature that comes down the pipe. They own four things: the data (what's true, what's authoritative, what can be derived), the security (the guardrails everyone else inherits automatically), the infrastructure (the road from "idea this morning" to "live in production safely"), and the coherence (making sure ten people building ten things still adds up to one product). That's a smaller team doing a harder, more important job.

I didn't want to just point at this from the sidelines. Over the past year we rebuilt our own internal operating system, Techstars OS, on exactly this model. It's the infrastructure behind how we support founders, mentors, and our partner network, a triple threat for all three. During Global Kickoff this week, we will give the incoming class hands-on access to it. If I'm going to tell 100 founders the old constraints are gone, the least I can do is show them the receipts.

Here's the part that should matter most to the founders in that room: this shift favors you, not the incumbent you're about to compete with. Every big company you're up against is carrying an engineering org built for the old constraint, hundreds of people in a line between an idea and a shipped product. You were never going to out-hire them. Now you don't have to.

Twenty years ago, the first hire was almost always an engineer. This year, in this room, for a real number of these founders, that might not be true anymore. I think that's the story of this fall class. I think it might be the story of the next 20 years of Techstars, too.

What's the first thing you're going to build?