Six Months. One Guy. AI Tools. $80 Million.
- Rich Washburn
- 17 hours ago
- 2 min read
I want you to sit with that for a second.
One guy. Not a team of 40. Not some multi-year startup saga. No funding rounds, no venture capitalists, no board meetings. Just him and the same AI tools you and I have access to. Six months later? Eighty million dollars. In cash.
That’s not a fluke. That’s leverage.
And if your first reaction is, “Well, I couldn’t do that,”—I need you to understand: the difference between him and you isn’t access. It’s intent. It’s vision. It’s how he used the tools. Because that’s all AI is—tools.
Not magic. Not sci-fi. Not sentient. Just utilitarian intelligence. That’s all. Intelligence on demand. Intelligence without payroll. And it’s getting more capable by the day.
But here’s the part that gets me: most people aren’t even trying to use it seriously.
They’ll waste hours scrolling nonsense, laugh at a goofy AI poem, and then turn around and say, “I don’t really get what it’s good for.”
You don’t “get it” because you haven’t tried to get it. You’ve been treating it like it’s Google’s weird little cousin with a personality disorder, instead of what it actually is—a digital workforce wrapped in natural language.
Do you want to know what AI actually is?
It’s the intern who never sleeps, the analyst who doesn’t take coffee breaks, the strategist who works at the speed of thought. It’s your ops team, your marketing team, your editor, your researcher, your assistant—all rolled into one. And it never asks for a raise.
But you’re still asking it how to insult your ex using only fish metaphors.
Listen, I use AI for the silly stuff too. I love a good absurd prompt. It’s fun. It’s creative. But here’s the thing: if that’s all you’re doing with it? You’ve lost. There’s nothing clever about self-imposed ignorance. No matter what your TikTok life coach says, not knowing how to use technology isn’t a personality trait—it’s a liability.
You are watching people build multi-million-dollar exits while you argue about whether AI is “actually useful.”
Spoiler: it is. In every possible field. Writing, coding, design, planning, analysis, summarizing, problem-solving. You name it. Someone out there is using it to move faster, go further, and do more than you with a tenth of the effort.
Because they’re pulling the lever. And you’re still waving the stick.
And now, the kicker: AI doesn’t just help you do your work.
It helps you build the thing that replaces your work.
If you’re not paying attention, you won’t just be outpaced—you’ll be out of the game. Not because AI took your job. Because someone who knew how to use it did.
That’s not doom and gloom. That’s reality. And the sooner you stop being proud of not engaging with this shift, the sooner you can get in front of it.
So, what are you going to do?
Because one guy, six months, AI tools—and now he’s got $80 million.
And you’ve got a lever. What are you pulling?
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