Have an LLC

The essay contrasts the old startup path—courting VCs, undergoing interrogations about "agile development methodology" amid steaks and strip clubs, selecting lawyers, incorporating, and assembling a tenured Oracle/Deloitte team to chase $100k ARR by Java 1.4—with the current moment, where a teenager's agent can supposedly rip out a seven-figure banger in the same time. Things are happening fast enough that incorporation is no longer an afterthought; in many cases it's the real blocker.

As a concrete example, the author built Calendearing about a year ago, when LLMs still took days to build relatively okay software. Calendearing was a tiny app to merge a dozen-plus calendars into one shareable URL for his wife; the build phase took four hours, after which he put a flat yearly price on it and deployed it. But it took about a week before he could actually launch, because he had to wait over the weekend for an EIN and legal docs to accept payments and separate finances. A week is light-years faster than the grandpappy era, but it feels artificially annoying when a real business can now be built in days or hours. He notes positive government work too: the IRS has done instant EINs for most people for years, and Europe has exciting developments with EU-INC.

The advice is to get an LLC even if you don't have something to launch right now, so you can move quickly if an idea appears. They're not particularly difficult to get: Stripe Atlas has been building out LLCs alongside C-corps for a while, and there are many other LLC creators—just ask your agent. An LLC helps force separation of personal and work finances from the start, helps with accepting payments or signing up for a bank account, and provides some legal liability shielding. Liability is pooled across ventures, but that's usually a reasonable tradeoff if they're all early-stage. The excerpt ends as it begins to mention another use for an LLC.