In the olden days, land was really scarce because you would need to be around your people, you would need to have a source of water, you would need to have arable land around you, and since travel was not that developed, you would be locked into places and those places would not have unlimited land. Imagine you are living in a town on some hill. That that will give you the picture.

Then came a time when we got wheels, we got horses, we got motorcars, and now you can travel anywhere. You Practically have infinite land. So before you were geo locked, now you are not. But after this geo lock got removed, not every piece of land has the same value as the one in which you were living before. The value for the land is coming from how valuable other people think it is. Either it is because other people want to live there or other people think there is valuable stuff there. So before you had constant supply and that made land valuable. And now you have almost unlimited supply. And what makes it valuable is other people’s interest in it. I think software is undergoing something like that only. Before software, you could not have a lot of it. But now anyone can spin off pretty much anything. I just saw a video where a guy made. Literal one is two and replica of Minecraft by wipe coding, and that game, that exact game, turned a guy into a multi-millionaire by the way, just a few years ago. So software is somehow now resembling sprawling land, and what? Land is valuable the one the people have interest in. It’s about the presence or the value embedded in it. So it is going to be people who make the software valuable now instead of them being locked to. Only a few set of softwares like before.

Once land becomes abundant, “there is land here” stops being the source of value.

Imagine ten thousand people can generate ten thousand competent CRM products. The CRM code itself begins approaching commodity status. But one CRM might contain the customers. Another contains the ecosystem of consultants. Another is where a particular industry has standardized its workflows. Another has a creator with a huge audience. Another has accumulated twenty years of business data. Another becomes fashionable among startups. So those CRMs with these type of interest vested in them become valuable and others are worthless. It is the human connection that will give value to the upcoming software products.

When something stops being scarce, its value shifts from coming from scarcity to how much other people value it. You can see this in terms of media. Before Not everyone could take pictures and newspapers were spectacles. But now anybody can take photos, so now every photo is as valuable as those that used to be in those newspapers as a symbol of scarcity. Now the photos that are valuable are the ones that people really have interest in. That’s why the image of an egg. On Instagram gets so much traction. It’s it’s all about people. When scarcity is gone, you can see this in terms of nepotism as well. That you might have hundreds of people who are able to do the job, but the nephew of the owner gets the job because there is a human connection there. So no matter what product, in face of commoditization, you have to. Carve out the human connection.

When something is difficult to produce, the ability to produce it is valuable.

When everyone can produce it, value migrates elsewhere.

It migrates toward reputation, relationships, attention, community, history, trust, status, distribution, culture, embedded workflows and accumulated human activity.

So in a world of abundant software, the founder’s problem changes.

You have to go for other bastions of scarcity. Maybe that bastion might be that you can attract people, or maybe that you have access to some type of hardware that others cannot provide, or you have licenses. That no one else has, you have to have something going for you, or maybe you have figured out a way to reach a set of people that others have not.

You have to build a world around your software or whatever product you have, because think about a plot of land in the middle of nowhere versus Manhattan. It is the human density and human interest that gives value.