There’s a Massive AI Vacuum — and I’m Giving Away the Blueprint
- Rich Washburn
- 3 minutes ago
- 4 min read
I’m not writing this to launch something. I’m writing this because I genuinely cannot believe this hasn’t been built yet. There is a massive vacuum in the AI space right now — and it’s sitting squarely in the 50+ professional crowd. I know that because I work with them every single day.
Seasoned operators. Former executives. Builders. People who have carried real weight. People who’ve managed risk, signed checks, survived recessions, navigated politics, and made hard calls when there wasn’t a clean answer.
They’re not confused about life. They’re trying to understand where they fit in an AI-shaped future. And almost no one is building for them.
Not seriously, structurally or with respect.
You see surface-level stuff. Webinars. “AI for Beginners.” Generic Slack groups. But nothing that treats experienced operators like what they are — an untapped capital reserve of judgment, heuristics, pattern recognition, and lived experience. And that’s insane.
Because firms like McKinsey & Company are literally paying senior professionals to brain-dump their knowledge so it can be captured, modeled, and reused. They understand something the broader market seems to be ignoring: Experience is infrastructure. And if we don’t capture it, scale it, and connect it to the next generation of builders, it disappears.
Let me give you a concrete example.
There’s a reason people say we couldn’t rebuild the Space Shuttle program today even if we wanted to. The technical documentation existed, sure — but so much of the real understanding lived in the heads of NASA engineers who learned by doing. That tribal, contextual, “we know how this really works” knowledge wasn’t fully written down. Some of those people are retired. Some are gone.
When knowledge lives only in heads, it evaporates.
Right now, we are sitting on decades of operational intelligence locked inside 50+ professionals who have seen things that younger builders simply haven’t had time to see yet. And at the same time, the younger AI-native crowd is hungry for that wisdom. I know that because they come to me for it. But I don’t have all of it. I have slivers. I have perspective. I leverage AI aggressively. I point them toward domain experts. And many of those experts? They’re in the 50+ bracket — because expertise takes time.
So here’s the disconnect:
The veterans want relevance.The younger builders want wisdom. AI is the bridge. And yet there is no serious, well-built meeting ground for this to happen at scale. That’s the vacuum.
So I built the bones of one.
It’s called AI Builder 50+. That name doesn’t matter. It’s a placeholder. Scrap it. Rename it. Rebrand it. Burn it down and rebuild it. I don’t care.
What I built is not a “course.”
It’s a functioning concept. A platform framework. Structured onboarding. Learning tracks. Builder lab. AI mentor. Community layer. Progress mechanics. It works. It’s real. It lets someone step in and see the shape of the thing.
And I am giving it away. Not as a trap or funnel. Not as a hidden equity grab. If it turns into something meaningful and someone wants to give me a monetary high five down the road, great. If not? I genuinely don’t care. This is a gift. Because I care about this space.
I care about the fact that there is a giant, obvious hole in the market and we’re just letting it sit there. And I’m tired of watching it sit there.
Let me be even more blunt.
There are operators — the real ones — who, after one or two conversations, go build something. They execute. They don’t need hand-holding. They don’t need daily reassurance. They take the insight and turn it into output.
And then there are people — on both the older and younger sides — who talk endlessly and build nothing.
The posers aren’t age-bound. They’re mindset-bound.
The opportunity here is to build a space that quietly squeezes them out.
Imagine something like Y Combinator for experienced operators — but connected to younger AI-native builders who bring tool fluency and speed. The veterans bring judgment, capital, and scar tissue. The younger crowd brings velocity. Both sides cut the fluff. Both sides build.
That’s powerful not hypothetical. That’s obvious. And yet no one serious has claimed it.
This is not me trying to run another community. I don’t want to run it. I don’t want to babysit it. I’ll help architect it. I’ll advise. I’ll support the technical backbone. But I want someone who sees this and says, “I’ll take it from here.” Because a real operator will look at this and immediately see the leverage. A non-operator will ask for a roadmap, a reassurance call, and five more conversations before moving an inch. This is the filter.
And here’s the long game people are missing:
If we don’t create structured ways to capture, connect, and scale the lived intelligence of experienced professionals, we are going to lose it. Not dramatically. Not overnight. Quietly. One retirement at a time.
Meanwhile, AI is accelerating.
We have a narrow window where human experience can be encoded, amplified, and turned into durable economic leverage instead of fading into anecdotes at dinner parties. That matters more to me than whether my name is attached to a platform.
So if you’re over 50 and you’re still an operator — not a passenger, not coasting, not waiting for permission — this is yours.
Take the bones. Make it better. Rename it. Expand it. Pair it with interns. Turn it into the MySpace, the Facebook, the X, the Y Combinator — whatever you see when you look at it. Just build it. Because the vacuum is real. The demand is real. The value locked inside that demographic is staggering. And it would be a waste — an absolute waste — if we let it evaporate just because nobody stepped up and claimed the obvious play.
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