This Week in Startups · Thursday, October 1, 2026
Brian Chesky predicted that AI will significantly lower the cost of software development by allowing people to communicate with computers in natural language, similar to how cameras democratized photography. He believes this shift will enable millions of new startups, as individuals with niche business ideas can now create software without needing to be expert programmers. This will lead to an abundance of software and a boon for entrepreneurship.
“AI means you can now tell a computer to do something in your language. The moment you don't have to learn a different language, you can use your natural language, English, suddenly kind of everyone in a way can be a programmer like everyone's a photographer you don't have to actually have a skill now there will be programming skills but suddenly anyone can do that now when it's possible there's gonna be so much more software we're gonna live in an abundance of software i think in a podcast you reference like a ski instructor or a ski company like a niche business that couldn't have developed hired great software engineers”
“But now they can the best engineer you've ever had. developing their app. And so suddenly the skills are different. We have to understand skiing, human psychology, taste, design, and how to operate and have a conversation with that tool.”
“But you don't have to necessarily build the infrastructure. Just like we never built servers because we had AWS. And now it's like you're just going to talk to this thing and it's going to make your software for you. So I think this is going to create I think this is going to create millions of startups.”