Hi!

I harvested the first cucumbers this week. Small, slightly crooked, the kind that taste better than anything from a shop. Tomatoes need another couple of weeks. Still cherishing every minute of Swedish summer.

The longer I'm in product rooms, the more I notice how much oxygen features take up. What to build next, what a competitor shipped, what's missing before launch. That conversation has been the default for the entire time I've been doing this. Twenty-nine years and counting.

But three pieces I read recently, from Sequoia, First Round, and Elan Miller's Off-Menu newsletter, all landed on the same point from three different corners of the industry: features stopped being what separates you. When AI lets anyone build anything, the product itself isn't the differentiator anymore.

The disconnect between that conclusion and how teams actually talk is what I wrote about this week.

​The feature conversation →​

Hope your week is treating you well.

Anton

A few other things worth your time:

1. Services: The New Software from Sequoia. The argument: if you sell the tool, you're in a race against the model. Sell the work instead.
2. ​"AI-Powered" Isn't a Position by Arielle Jackson in First Round Review. Why "AI-powered X" stops being a position the moment five companies say it.
3. ​How To Survive The Great Tech Commoditization by Elan Miller. The line about meeting someone at a networking event and forgetting them before the coat check is the one that stuck.
4. ​Neuma. A new course on building personal AI systems with Claude Code, aimed at non-technical people. Worth a look if you've been thinking about getting more deliberate about your AI setup.