We are on the precipice of seeing an avalanche of new tech founders. AI will lower the barrier to entry for people to start their own businesses. Domain experts will have a huge advantage in building the next big companies.

When I started my first company back in 2005, I already built a proof of concept myself using what little coding ability I had. I had an idea from my domain experience working at eBay, so I started experimenting at nights by building a simple website to prove it out. Once that website started generating some revenue, I proved to myself that there was a there there. But I was limited by my coding ability, or lack thereof. I partnered with two CS majors from Berkeley and Stanford to write the code that I couldn't write and design the site architecture. We had to raise some money to buy servers from Dell and host them at Rackspace. I had to learn Photoshop to design our logo and user interface.

20 years later, things have changed dramatically. With the cloud, you no longer need to host your own servers. With AI you can generate logos, user interfaces, build an app, and even generate code. No-code solutions like Bolt, Lovable, and v0 are exploding. Are they perfect? Not yet, but neither is the code generated by humans. Things are moving so rapidly and it will only get better as AI improves and learns from its mistakes. We just need to become the best AI collaborators. It's only a matter of time.

The future belongs to those who have the domain expertise and insights from years of deep enough work to see the cracks. There's opportunity hidden in those cracks. If something frustrates you, it probably frustrates many others. If you can solve that problem at scale, people will likely pay you to solve it for them as well.

For many Asian Americans who were raised to stick with the safe and secure their whole lives and never take risks, the bar has also been lowered to experimentation and building. Before, the ones with access to capital could more easily build solutions. Now with AI, the barriers to entry have dropped and it has become much more accessible to create software for an MVP to test. Stop waiting for permission. Stop living for the approval of your parents or peers (who are likely also waiting for permission). Bet on yourself and leverage everything you've learned.