62 · Avant and the Speedrun

Avant — the AI-native lending platform — holds one of the fastest recorded unicorn timelines: a $1 billion valuation one month and sixteen days after founding. Jet.com hit a billion four months after incorporation. Slack reached unicorn status in a year and a quarter. Bird in about the same. Groupon in a year and a half. Krutrim, the Indian AI startup, reached a billion one month after launch. Remember: everything happens all at once, faster than every day seems to allow — but the volume of work that compounds into that abrupt, instantaneous manifestation transcends what you can fathom. The timeline from founding to billion-dollar valuation has completely changed.

Lovable went from a $1M to $100M ARR in eight months following its late-2024 public launch. This can totally happen to you. Why not you? Why is it okay to watch someone else do it, but not you? You've got the brains, the heart and the soul. Why trap yourself in the weak frequency that says this can't be you? They work fewer hours; they are nowhere near as committed as you are. Why is it okay for them and not for you?

There is just this completely new side of business and entrepreneurship that I was not open-minded enough to enter. With today's tools, someone working eighteen hours a day for eighteen months can build a ten-million-dollar business online in less than a year — locked in with Claude Code, DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemini, ChatGPT, MATLAB, all the models. You can build a digitally-based billion-dollar hedge fund within not even ten years but half that, maybe less. It's the self-belief that deteriorates, not the opportunity.

Set — this is the part that matters. It's not an information gap. Identifying that alone lets me abandon the alternative of "learning everything before taking action." The people already in the positions I want are not geniuses; they often have less information than I do about business. It's very easy to carry a sunk-cost bias when a value has been your operating principle for years. Just like alpha decay, conviction eventually festers into counterproductive bias. The models that say "you need to acquire knowledge through work experience first" or "you must start and fail several businesses first" might themselves be adamant. Lay out the conventional truths and ask why each one carries a probability of error.

The first hit of your passive income will mean more than going from ten million to fifty. That one Stripe purchase notification at 2am while you were sleeping. There are people who went from zero to $50M+ in under five years — the same five years in which I graduated high school and ended up back in my parents' basement studying maths. When you trade time for money, you never scale beyond your own capacity. Time is a deeper currency than money, and time consumption is really a manifestation of attention — the direction your vectors point.

There is no such thing as overnight success — but you also do not need ten years to build generational wealth. A college student working part-time at McDonald's can package a PDF on how to make friends online and make five thousand dollars in two weeks with good distribution. You don't have to reinvent OpenAI.

You have a fifteen-month runway to launch your first startup. This is exciting. You have no idea how hard it will be — inches from getting wrecked in the market and in business. Cybersecurity is interesting because the vast majority of past breaches were BY humans; eliminating the human from error detection is the bottleneck. Tie several LLMs together with an API and they radically shorten the identify-and-debug loop. Incumbents hold strong established trust — that's the wall. We know nothing about cybersecurity, nothing about business. And that's the wrong frame — that's still the mindset of watching YouTube videos to "learn more" first. You need one hour of a podcast showing a proven method, then momentum. The plan: from August, pre-launch. Runway of $5k from savings; $25k into a diversified portfolio; $10k in a savings account for cashflow. An agentic AI B2B SaaS cybersecurity business. The $5k is tuition. This can fail — it probably will. Launch the MVP, iterate, get the first sale, jump onto the next. We're taking over the Titans.