Many years ago, I listened to Subroto Bagchi describe life as a river. It’s a metaphor that is astonishingly simple, yet deeply profound.
A river does not know every turn ahead. It does not know where the next bend leads. It simply keeps flowing.
Recently, while spending time with founders, investors, operators, and AI builders in the Bay Area, I found myself thinking about that river again.
The most surprising thing about the trip wasn’t the technology. It wasn’t the demos or even the pace of innovation.
It was the number of incredibly smart people who openly admitted they didn’t know where things were headed.
For the longest time, I assumed that somewhere out there, someone had the answers. The leading AI labs. The successful founders. The investors. Surely someone had the map.
But conversation after conversation revealed something different. Nobody really knows.
And strangely, that was comforting. Because once you stop looking for the map, you start paying attention to the river.
One theme kept showing up repeatedly. The founders who seem most grounded right now are not attached to their plans. They are attached to the problems they want to solve.
The AI landscape is changing every few months. Products are changing. Teams are changing. Business models are changing. The mission remains. The plan evolves.
The river keeps flowing.
Another belief that seems to be changing is where moats come from. For years, we believed product was the moat. Today, building software has never been easier. Distribution hasn’t. Relationships haven’t. Trust hasn’t.
One founder put it beautifully: your first few million dollars in revenue should not come from people you know.
That line still buzzes in my head because it reflects a larger truth. When the river speeds up, building the boat becomes easier. Finding the right current becomes harder.
The third idea I kept coming back to was what many founders called the 95% threshold. At 85% accuracy, AI feels impressive. At 95% accuracy, it becomes useful. That final leap changes everything.
Customers stop experimenting and start trusting. Adoption scales. Entire industries move. Most breakthroughs don’t happen when something becomes possible. They happen when something becomes reliable.
As I flew back home, I kept thinking about rivers. Most of us spend our lives trying to predict where the water will go next.
Maybe the better question is whether we are learning fast enough to move with it.
The founders who win in this era may not be the ones with the best forecasts. They may simply be the ones who learn faster than everyone else.
The river keeps flowing.
Perhaps the question isn’t where it’s headed, but whether we’re willing to flow with it.
