The startup ecosystem has fundamentally bifurcated. According to Carta’s State of Startups 2025, AI companies now capture 44% of all startup capital—up from just 19% in 2018. But this headline figure dramatically understates the real picture.
The split becomes more extreme at each funding stage:
A non-AI company that successfully raises Seed and Series A will hit a wall at growth stages. Seven out of ten growth-stage dollars now flow to AI companies. This isn’t merely investor preference—it’s structural filtering.
Non-AI companies cannot access the capital required to scale. The path that worked for the last generation of startups has fundamentally narrowed.
Two Different Games
If you’re building something that isn’t AI-native, you’re not playing the same game as AI founders. You’re playing a different game with different rules, different timelines, and different odds.
The AI game offers abundant capital, compressed timelines, and multiple paths to success. The non-AI game features scarce capital, extended timelines, and increasingly narrow paths.
Recognizing which game you’re in is the first strategic decision. As FourWeekMBA’s second-order thinking framework suggests, the obvious choice to “build AI” isn’t available to everyone—but understanding these structural dynamics is essential for any founder’s strategy.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
