I’ve spent over 16 years interviewing millionaires, CEOs, and self-made entrepreneurs about how they built their fortunes. The advice usually comes down to the same fundamentals: work hard, invest early, and find an “unfair advantage.”
For decades, that unfair advantage in the tech world was technical literacy. If you couldn’t code, you had to hire someone who could—often costing tens of thousands of dollars before you even launched.
But something different is happening right now—something I haven’t seen in my entire career. The cost of technical execution is collapsing to near zero, and a new class of entrepreneur is stepping into the vacuum.
A fire chief. A dental hygienist. An 18-year-old in Malaysia. These aren’t the Silicon Valley founders you read about in tech blogs. They are people in your neighborhood, with zero technical background, who are quietly rewriting the rules of the digital economy.
I recently spoke with Dhruv Amin, co-founder and CEO of Anything—an AI platform that has become ground zero for this movement—to understand why this is happening now, and what it means for anyone thinking about their financial future in 2026.
“These Aren’t Developers. They’re Experts In Their Own Lives.”
Amin, a former Google product manager, has had a front-row seat to a shift he calls unprecedented.
“We have over 1,000,000 users now,” Amin told me. “And the thing that surprises people is who they are. They’re real estate agents, film producers, healthcare workers, salon owners. They’re people who know a specific problem inside and out and now they finally have a way to solve it.”
He walked me through a few of the “regular” people currently building revenue-generating businesses on the platform:
The Fire Chief: “In Northern California, a fire chief woke up at 4 a.m. to build an app replacing the whiteboards fire departments use to track personnel during emergencies. He had never written a line of code. Today, the app is live, and he charges fire departments $1,000 a year for it.”
The Teenager: “An 18-year-old in Malaysia watched his mom struggle to respond to Google reviews for her small business. He built her an AI-powered response tool. Now, he sells it for $4 a month to businesses across Southeast Asia.”
The Dental Hygienist: “A dental hygienist built a gum health tracking app with voice input so she could log data without taking her hands off her patients.”
“These aren’t prototypes,” Amin emphasized. “These are live businesses with real customers paying real money.”
From “Toy” To Asset Class
The industry calls this “vibe coding”—building software through natural language conversation rather than syntax. But for a long time, there was a catch: the tools were great at making toys, but terrible at building businesses.
“You haven’t seen real businesses built on most of these tools because users get stuck at the ‘last mile,'” Amin explained. “They can generate a cool demo, but handling payments, databases, user authentication, or submitting to the App Store? That’s where non-technical people used to hit a wall.”
This is where the landscape has shifted in late 2025. The new wave of AI tools aren’t just code-completion assistants; they are autonomous agents. They act like senior engineers—writing code, running the app, spotting errors, and fixing their own bugs without human intervention.
Amin’s company has made headlines for betting the house on this mainstream shift. In a move that turned heads across Silicon Valley, they took $2 million of the venture funding they had just raised—18% of it—and spent it on a single asset: the domain Anything.com.
“People thought we were out of our minds,” Amin admitted. “But think about it: when a dentist or a teacher or a teenager decides to build their first income stream, what are they going to type into their browser? We’re betting that ‘building software’ is going to become as common as ‘starting an online store.’ And when that happens, the destination needs to be obvious.”
It’s either a sign of the frothy excess of the AI era—or a signal that the people closest to this technology see something the rest of us are just starting to understand.
The “Asset-Light” Financial Future
Here is what struck me most from a personal finance perspective: the barrier to entry for building an income-generating asset has never been lower.
“Domain expertise beats technical skill 10 to 1,” Amin said. “The fire chief knew what firefighters needed. The kid in Malaysia knew what his mom needed. That knowledge is the hard part. The coding used to be the barrier. Now it’s not.”
This echoes a concept I’ve heard repeatedly from self-made millionaires: ownership beats labor.
In the past, if you had a brilliant idea for a niche software product, you had three options: learn to code (years), hire a dev shop ($50K+), or find a technical co-founder (giving up 50% equity). Most people just gave up.
Today, the “CapEx” of starting a software business has effectively dropped to a monthly subscription fee. You can build a mobile app from your couch—literally, via your phone—and submit it to the App Store without ever touching a server or a command line.
The 2026 Opportunity
As we head into 2026, the employment landscape feels uncertain. AI is reshaping industries and layoffs continue to make headlines. But there is a flip side to this disruption.
“There’s never been more opportunity for someone to take their financial destiny into their own hands,” Amin told me. “A year ago, you needed a team of engineers. Now? You can describe what you want, have an autonomous agent build it, and have a business live in the App Store in days.”
I asked Amin what separates the people who actually make money from the ones who just play around.
“Three things,” he said. “First, they solve a problem they personally understand. They’re not guessing. Second, they start small and specific. Nobody creates the next Facebook on day one; they build a gum health tracker or a review tool. Third, they charge money early. Paying customers tell you if you have a business. Free users don’t.”
My Takeaway
I started my career helping people navigate traditional paths to financial success: budgeting, investing, and climbing the corporate ladder. That advice still matters.
But the world is changing fast. The ability to create software—once the exclusive domain of a high-paid priesthood—is becoming a utility, accessible to anyone who can write a sentence.
You don’t need venture capital. You don’t need to quit your job. You just need a problem you understand deeply and the willingness to ask an AI to solve it.
The fire chief did it at 4 a.m. before his shift. The Malaysian teenager did it after school.
As Amin put it: “The hottest programming language right now is English. And that changes everything about who gets to build.”
Maybe that sounds too simple. But sometimes the biggest financial opportunities are the ones hiding in plain sight—the ones that seem so accessible that we assume they can’t possibly work.
Until, of course, your neighbor builds one.
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