Reflections on Builder Day 2024
June 2024
Stripe's Builder Day came and went, and I keep returning to one observation: the gap between demo and deployment has collapsed.
A year ago, shipping something meaningful required weeks of scaffolding. Database, auth, payments, hosting, CI/CD — the ceremony of infrastructure before the work of product. Builder Day demos showed something different: founders going from idea to working prototype in hours, not weeks.
The enabling tools are now obvious in retrospect. AI coding assistants that actually understand context. Vercel's deploy-to-URL in seconds. Stripe's own checkout sessions that require minimal backend. The infrastructure has become ambient — present but not demanding attention.
What struck me was less the technology than the mindset shift among builders I talked to. The anxiety of technical risk is fading. The question "can we build this?" is increasingly assumed. The harder questions now center on distribution, timing, and whether anyone actually wants what you're building.
This is healthy. The best builders always focused on problems first and technology second. Now the tooling matches that priority.
What Hasn't Changed
Builder Day also clarified what persists despite the tooling revolution. Finding the right problem still requires immersion and luck. Distribution is harder than ever in saturated channels. And the emotional work of building — uncertainty, rejection, persistence — remains unchanged.
The demos that resonated weren't the most technically impressive. They were the ones where the builder clearly understood a specific pain point because they had lived it. A therapist streamlining intake forms. A nurse tracking shift schedules. The tools enabled faster execution, but the insight came from domain expertise.
Looking Forward
I suspect we're entering a period where the bottleneck shifts decisively from engineering to judgment. With lower barriers to building, the advantage goes to those who can identify valuable problems and ship the right subset of possible features.
For those of us who came up through engineering, this requires developing new muscles. Customer research, competitive analysis, go-to-market strategy — these become higher-leverage skills than optimizing database queries.
The builders who adapt will thrive. The ones who don't will find themselves optimizing infrastructure for products no one uses.
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Building Do Little Lab. Previously: SRE, engineering manager, humanitarian relief organizer.